“Maybe Bill and Thomas can lend their support to the cause in song,” Kelorn said.
Poster plastered, Christine put the rest of the pile and her roll of tape on the counter and accepted the cup of tea Kelorn pushed her way. Kelorn’s smile catching, Christine blew on her tea and began to cool down herself. Cutting her eyes my way, “Don’t tell me Thomas has got you writing songs with him now,” she said.
“Oh, I’m afraid it goes beyond that, my dear,” Kelorn said. “Thomas has enlisted Bill as—get ready for it, now—his drummer.”
I scurried up the ladder with the last of the unshelved books like a dog-treed squirrel. What the hell had I been thinking? Me, a musician. Pretentious asshole.
But before Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki was spinewise upward in its proper place, Christine laughed warmly and predicted that I’d make a fine drummer. But of course she would. Christine despised the bad and loved the good and therefore was altogether good herself. And Christine loved me. Christine loved Bill. I jumped down from the ladder five steps from the floor.
“I’m not saying I’ll be any good at it right away,” I said. “But it’s really a gas, you know? And I’m willing to work, I’m ready to put in the time. And Thomas, he’s got a kit waiting for me over at where he’s rented us a rehearsal space and he says he’s going to give me an extra key so I can go over there and practise any time I want. And maybe”—it was all coming out now, flood of relief flooding—“you could come by sometime and, you know, jam with us.” Jam. Hot damn, I really did feel like a musician now. “I mean, if you’re into it.”
And not for Thomas’s sake but for my own, this last invitation. Because whatever feels good you want your closest ones to share. You see a sunset of particular postcard beauty and you wish she was there to see it with you, simple as that.
Finishing her cup of tea and gathering up her posters, “Maybe,” she said. “Why don’t we check out your drums and have a look at this space tonight after we eat.”
“Okay,” I said. Everything really does work out in the end if you procrastinate long enough, I thought.
Goodbyes and see-you-tomorrows said, but before we could ding the doorbell on our way out, “Oh, I almost forgot, hold on a sec’,” Kelorn called out. She went to the shelves and came back with a copy of the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada. “Give this to Thomas when you see him, will you?”
“Thomas?” I said. “What for?” Thomas was one of the lucky ones, was 4-F—an irregular heartbeat—had told me so over our very first beer.
“I ran into him at the Grab Bag the other day and he said someone who lived downstairs from him wanted a copy. Insisted on paying for it, too. Practically forced me to take the money.”
I took the book, and Christine and I headed off hand in hand, the protest posters in her free hand, the book for Thomas’s friend in mine.
11.
ROOT VEGETABLE COUSCOUS sitting in both our bellies nicely, the fiery Tunisian red sauce that went along with it helping to keep us warm underneath our jackets, Christine and I strolled a lovers’ stroll down freshly snow-dusted Bloor Street tight to each other’s hip.
“So you haven’t actually seen this place Thomas has rented?” she said.
“Nope, tonight’s the night.”
“But you say it’s big enough for an entire band to practise in?”
“It’s great, isn’t it? And we’re going to need every inch of it, believe me. Besides Thomas and me, eventually there’ll be a steel guitarist and a bass player. Plus, Thomas says we’re going to want to get a big Hammond B-3 organ sound sometimes, so we’ll need space for that, too.”
Not seeing us but right there anyway down Bloor at Avenue Road, coming out the front door of the Park Plaza Hotel, there was Thomas.
“Blonde or brunette?” I asked.
Christine laughed. “What makes you so sure she’s not a redhead?”
“Maybe she is,” I said. Thomas wasn’t so far away we couldn’t have yelled out his name and caught up, but we lagged behind on purpose to keep on being just the two of us.
“Well, whoever she is, it’s not anybody we know,” Christine said. “That place is ritzy. Like, fifty bucks a night, minimum.”
We both considered this for a moment.
“Hey, where does Thomas get all his dough from, anyway?” Christine said.
“I don’t know. I never asked.”
“I mean, the way he’s always paying for all of us whenever we go out? And the rehearsal space and the drums he got for you? He doesn’t work—I’ve never even heard him mention having to get a job.”
“He said the drums were a used set he bought off somebody in the village,” I said. “And the rent he’s paying on the place is cheap, lots of bands use it to play there.”
“But it costs something, right?”
“Well, yeah.” We walked in silence some more.
“Boo!”
Thomas leapt out in front of us from around the darkened corner of the Park Plaza, screaming and waving both hands in the air like some kind of psychotic windmill. Seeing us knocked back and scattered apart over the sidewalk, he let his arms fall to his sides and smiled.
“Got you two, didn’t I?” he said.
Heart still pounding but at least out of my throat now, “Yeah, you got us,” I said.
“Christ, Thomas,” Christine said.
“Ah, come on now, y’all, I was only having a little fun.”
Knowing that Christine was justifiably a little more sensitive to men lunging out of the dark at her than me, even in jest, I grabbed her hand again, gave it a squeeze, and nodded up at the hotel. “Who’s your rich friend?” I said.
Thomas looked up high himself; after the briefest contemplation, let the cold wind deliver a carefully blown pucker to some unknown room on some undetermined floor. Kiss delivered, “Like my Uncle Pen used to say, ‘A gentleman never kisses and tells.’”
Christine shook her head but couldn’t resist a slight smile. “It sounds like this Uncle Pen of yours is quite a guy,” she said.
I already knew all about Uncle Pen, had heard over our first beers together how Thomas, an only child, had been brought up by his uncle after both of his parents had been killed in a head-on car wreck when he was a still a baby.
“Rest his sweet soul, indeed he was, Miss Christine, indeed he was.”
“Your uncle,” Christine said, “he’s passed on?”
“To a better world than this one almost four years now.”
“I thought you said you worked on his farm this past summer picking cotton to help get the cash to move up here,” I said.
Thomas shifted his weight from one cowboy boot to the other, lifted his eyes above the roof of the Park Plaza.
“I did, I did work on his farm this summer,” he said. “It’s just that it’s not his farm any more. You see, the bank, they came in and foreclosed on his place before he died. Two rainless summers in a row and that was that. You call some place home for twenty years and with a couple strokes of a pen by a big-city lawyer you’re working for your neighbour down the road.”
Christine and I both shook our heads.
“A family by the name of the Hannahs, they own the place now. But everybody still calls it Uncle Pen’s farm. And every summer after he had that heart attack, I hired myself out to the Hannahs so I could be close to Uncle Pen again. The morning dew on that cotton in those fields and the hot dust from the combine in the afternoon sun were as much a part of the old boy as anything else.”
In spite of all his talk about scorching Mississippi summers, standing there on the street corner made it feel even colder than it was. Putting my hands in my coat pockets, I remembered the book Kelorn had given me.
“Almost forgot, here,” I said, handing it over.
Thomas took the book. Stared at it.
“Kelorn said you wanted a copy,” I said. “For your friend, she said.”
“Oh, right,” he said, folding the slim book
in two and sticking it in his back pocket. “Thanks. Thanks a lot. I’ll make sure he gets it. I know he’ll really appreciate it.” He reached for his wallet. “Here, let me give you some—”
“You already paid her.”
Wallet halfway out, “I did?”
“She said you did.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, pushing it back. “Now I remember.”
“C’mon you two, let’s go,” Christine said. “And I hope this place you rented is better heated than Bill’s room. I almost had to wear my clothes to bed last night.”
The big grin was back on Thomas’s face.
“No need to worry about that, Miss Christine. We’re well-heated, well-stocked, and fully soundproof. I think you’re going to find things most accommodating. I dare say y’all are going to learn to just love it there.”
12.
IT WAS A LIVING room–sized room with a scuffed hardwood floor and there weren’t any windows. There was a pair of rickety, glass-paned French doors along the back wall that led to a black metal balcony, and hundreds of yellow, pink, and brown cardboard egg cartons had been carefully stapled to all four walls to make sure Thomas’s music stayed in and that of all the other bands in the building stayed out. There were musical instruments everywhere you looked and a Panasonic seven-inch reel-to-reel recording machine and two stand-up microphones in the middle of the floor. And there was no smoking allowed. When Christine reached into her shoulder bag as she toured her way around from drum kit to electric guitar to fiddle, Thomas was one step ahead of her.
“Miss Christine, I’m sorry, but I must insist, no.”
One hand absently rummaging around in her purse for her pack, the other running a careful finger along the body of an aged mandolin in its worn black case, Christine looked up a little startled.
“Sorry,” she said, pulling her hand back from the instrument. “It’s just that it’s so beautiful. It’s a mandolin, right?”
Explaining what he’d really meant, how smoking was very dangerous in an old house like this, “But you can look at, touch, and play anything in this room you want,” Thomas said. “Nothing would please me more, in fact.”
Christine didn’t need any more encouragement. She picked up the mandolin and brought it low against her body like an undersized guitar. Thomas placed two fingers underneath its neck and gently raised the instrument upward, chest-high, where it was intended to be played.
“You have good taste, Miss Christine. This is a Gibson F-5, the same kind Bill Monroe made famous in the twenties.”
“Are they that old?” she said.
“This one is.”
Christine lost for the moment trying to adjust her fingers to the tiny fretboard and its tightly tuned strings, Thomas caught me staring at the black drum kit on the other side of the room and nodded me over.
I knew I should have wanted to sit right down and start bashing away—as much fun as it had been, pounding on my pillows and mattress at home was definitely starting to lose its beginner’s charm—but all at once I was trembling eleven years old again and petrified to kiss Tracy Linden behind the gym bleachers my first ever kiss on the lips because, my God, I realized I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do. And what if I went ahead and just did it anyway but mangled it all so badly—my nose in her eye; my lips too hard, too soft—that she rips herself away from me and I am known to every girl for all time everywhere as Bill “The Kissing Geek” Hansen? A first kiss, after all, is forever.
“Nice,” I said, risking a timid forefinger touch to the crash cymbal.
“Nothing special,” he said, “pretty much your basic snare, tom-tom, floor tom setup. Should get the job done, though. And may the Good Lord keep you from the temptation to play ten-minute drum solos, Amen.”
I smiled and gave the cymbal another light rap.
Thomas picked the drumsticks off the snare. “Feel like having a go?” he said.
Christine stopped moving her fingers over the strings of the mandolin and everything all of a sudden just a little too quiet. She looked over at Thomas offering me the sticks and I moved my eyes from her to him to the door of the studio, wishing I were somehow on its other side and down the stairs and back home alone in my room.
Laying the mandolin back in its case, “So, Thomas, what’s the deal?” Christine said. “Where’d you get the money for this place and all this great stuff?”
Now Thomas was the one with his eyes darting toward the door. But only for an instant. He carefully placed the sticks back on top of the drums and cleared his throat.
“Well, I was going to let y’all in on this sooner or later, but I figured we’d be a little further down the road as a group. But you’ve got a right to know and I guess now’s as good a time as any.”
Picking up on the words we and group, Christine caught my eye but I looked right back at Thomas.
“You see, in the South,” he said, “there’s a long tradition of someone in the community who’s not actually an artist themself lending what they do have—money, basically—to help out someone else who God has blessed with talent and vision. It’s like in medieval times, kings and queens giving the cats who wrote the symphonies a salary to live on so they could do their thing. You’ve got to understand, the South is still a very feudal place.”
“You’ve got a patron?” I said.
“No, we’ve got a patron,” he answered. “Me, you, Christine—the band, Buckskin, The Duckhead Secret Society.”
This time more than a mere attempt at making puzzled eye contact. “Me?” Christine said.
“But who?” I interrupted. “Who’s bankrolling us? I mean you—who’s bankrolling you?”
Thomas put a finger to his lips and shook his head.
“That is the one and only condition our benefactor has demanded in return for his generous support. Complete anonymity. Rest assured, there is total understanding and an absolute, mutual respect between our camp and him regarding artistic priorities and objectives in terms of what Interstellar North American Music is all about and what we all want it to accomplish. But for reasons he obviously feels are important, only I know who signs the cheques.”
“You’re getting all this money from somebody you don’t even know?” Christine said. The tone of her voice tasting more like a challenge than an actual question, I worried how Thomas was going to take it. But at least she wasn’t thinking about what he’d meant by talking about her and the band any more.
But Thomas wasn’t angry at all, just sat down on the paint-chipped white radiator and rested his hands on his knees. “It’s like this,” he said.
“One day not long before I came up here and met y’all, I’m playing for spare change in front of the post office back home in Jackson when along comes this old-timer in the most beautiful white suit you ever saw hobbling up to drop off a letter. But instead of doing his business and being on his way, he ends up standing there leaning on his cane in that hundred-degree heat watching and listening to me play. Even when I finally say to him, ‘Afternoon, sir,’ he doesn’t blink, just whacks his cane a couple times on the pavement and lifts it off the ground and jabs it in the direction of my guitar like he wants to hear another song.
“I’m no nostalgia act, but it’s just me and him so I think what the heck, I’ll make the old boy’s day, give him what he wants. A little Red Foley, a little Johnny Horton—you know, hits from the forties and early fifties. But I’m no more than a quarter of the way through ‘The Battle of New Orleans’ when the old man raps that cane of his harder than he has yet and barks out at me, ‘If I wanted to listen to the goddamn radio, boy, I’d listen to the goddamn radio! Tell me something I don’t already know!’
“And right then and there I knew that he knew. I knew. So of course I go right into Interstellar North American Music overdrive and let it all hang out, give him the whole white soul royal treatment I knew he’d so deeply appreciate and understand. How long we were together there under that sun I can’t honestly say. Lon
g enough that I couldn’t keep my lids open any longer because of the sweat pouring down my face and stinging my eyes. And when I finally opened them back up, the old man was gone. And I went home knowing that everything—everything—was going to be all right.”
Thomas leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.
Christine and I looked at each other. “But what about the money?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, “what about the money?”
Thomas slowly reopened his eyes. He looked surprised he was here with us and not back in Mississippi.
“In my tip jar there was a business card with a P.O. Box number on it and on the other side a short note from the old man saying for me to send him a bill whenever I needed to buy something to help spread the word of my music.”
Christine and I were thinking the same thing, but, as usual, she was the one to say it.
“That’s it?” she said.
“I don’t know what you mean, Miss Christine.”
“I mean, you’re saying that all you’ve got to do to rent a studio like this or buy any instrument or new piece of equipment is mail off an invoice to this guy you met only that once and that’s it?”
“Well, yeah, that about sums it up,” Thomas said.
Christine looked at the floor. I looked at the drum kit. Thomas kept looking from Christine to me and back, no idea at all why we weren’t as thrilled with the whole arrangement as he was.
I tapped the crash cymbal again, but all it did was make a little noise for not very long at all, and then everything was like it was before.
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