Thomas stopped his pitch just long enough to turn around and two-finger motion to the waitress for another couple of coffees, although I’d barely touched mine and he definitely didn’t need another. In deference to my dad picking me up at my place in less than an hour, I waved the order away behind Thomas’s back. The girl, tie-dyed and long-haired and maybe nineteen, smiled at me and seemed thankful for the change in plans. Mincemeat tarts and pipe smoke and a childhood dog pal of her own, I thought.
“Listen,” he said, “here’s what you do, here’s what you and Miss Christine both do. Tomorrow night, each of you shoots on up there to your parents’ place and drops off your presents and has a glass of eggnog with the folks and kisses your mama on the cheek and shakes your daddy’s hand and does what every good boy and girl is supposed to do. That’s only what’s right and proper, and you’re going to do it, and that’s the way it should be. Okay. That’s settled. But that’s tomorrow night. Tonight, well, tonight—”
“I already told you, Thomas, Christine’s gone.”
“But she’ll be back. I mean, she’s—”
“She left this morning on the train with her mum and dad and little sister to spend the holidays with her brother and his wife in Montreal. She won’t be back until sometime late next week.”
Thomas opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but his lips fell shut before anything managed to come out. He took a long, greedy pull from his coffee and whisky. I felt bad for him, saw how disappointed he was, but Thomas always seemed to get what he wanted and maybe not getting it for a change might not be such a horrible thing.
“Look, thanks for the caffeine,” I said. “But I’ve still got to pack before my old man shows up.” I took a last drink to try to make some kind of appreciative dent. Our waitress was busy piling chairs on top of tables.
Thomas looked up from the empty cup still in his hand. In a quieter voice than I was used to, “But what about us?” he said. “What about the Duckhead Secret Society?”
“We’re coming back, Thomas,” I said. “We’re not going away forever.”
“Sure,” he said. He looked like a miserable little boy being left behind for summer vacation by all his neighbourhood buddies.
“Are you going to be all right?” I said. I knew he wasn’t going back to Mississippi for the holidays—“No money to get me there, and now that Uncle Pen’s gone, not much reason to go”—and I worried at the idea of him hanging around Yorkville feeling sorry for himself with too much time on his hands. But I had to go. My dad would be honking the horn of the station wagon in front of my place any time now. I really had to go.
“I’ll be okay,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“I’ll be fine.”
All of the chairs except ours up on the tables now, the waitress was making time wiping down the counter area waiting for us to finish up.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” I said.
He lifted his eyes.
“Come home with me.”
He looked back down at his cup. “That’s your idea?”
“Sure, why not? You’ll eat some home-cooked food for a change, sleep in a nice clean bed, and we’ll both just kick back for a few days. Do us both some good. By the time Christine gets back we’ll be all charged up and ready to go. What do you say?”
Thomas managed a tiny smile and stood up; put his hand on my shoulder.
“Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate the offer. I do.”
“But no?”
“But no. But thank you, Buckskin, I mean it.”
“What are you going to do then?” I said. “Nobody wants to spend Christmas all by themselves. And Yorkville’s going to be a ghost town. C’mon, come home with me. It’ll be fun.”
“No,” he said. “Thank you, but no.”
He slowly pulled on his jacket.
“Don’t you worry about me,” he said. “I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be just fine.”
Mississippi born and raised there, Memphis boarded and schooled there, Harvard, Massachusetts, one semester and too much of Professor Leary’s LSD dropped and dropped out there, sunny, southern California where anybody who knew anything knew it was all going down down there. The new music. A new way of relating. A new way of being. New age ...
Yeah Yeah Yeah. Far out. Out of sight. Groovy. Although, to be honest, some interesting sounds and even a few soulful souls if you can manage to avoid the peace sign–cramped fingers poking in your face everywhere you turn. But no twangy promised land, that’s for sure. And this a good lesson to remember. For the kingdom of Interstellar North American Music lies within you, Thomas, not anywhere out there anyhow. Remember to remember this.
But Joshua Tree. If he’d never come to L.A. he never would have heard of Joshua Tree. From a guy at a hoot night at the Troubadour between tokes of a shared joint between sets.
“If you want to get out of the city for a while and blow your mind, man, drop a tab and dig the desert sky at night. Go on out to Joshua Tree, you’ve never seen anything like it. Take 105 east for, like, two hours, then wait for the sun to go down and get out there in the middle of the desert and see something you’ve never seen before. Blow your fucking mind, man.”
And it did. It does. It still does. Even just imagining it. Even this far away and a bunch of freezing Canadian months since the last time there.
Getting ready to go, it always goes like this: score, fill up the tank of the Harley, and cruise by Ciro’s to see who wants to be this weekend’s old lady. Thomas is no player—not yet, anyway—but he’s got a nice smile and is six-foot slinky good looking in those spacy neon cowboy threads of his, and yeah, the guy can play, no doubt about that. What the women dig most, though, is that Thomas is such an absolute gentleman, a real psychedelicate courteous cat right smack dab in the middle of Freakville, USA, the Sunset Strip, insisting on having whoever ends up riding on the back of his bike out to the desert for the weekend with him hold on to his entire stash, saying, as he helps her put on her helmet, “It’s just easier this way, darlin’. Trusting somebody is just so much easier.”
Thomas has called ahead and reserved his usual room at the Joshua Tree Inn, room #8—double bed, no TV, $13.50 a night—and he and she check in, get their key, and share the shower and a bar of soap to scrub the road out of their pores. Afterwards, don’t bother dressing, roll a doobie or two, and kick back on top of the sheets passing the joint back and forth waiting for the sun to go down and the moon to come up and the stars over Joshua Tree to begin to do their thing.
And if nodding off for a bit, only for a bit, eventually waking up in a panic like it’s the first morning of the first day of an eight-year-old’s holy grail of a summer vacation. Whip on your clothes, jump on the Harley, and race off into the night in search of a place to get close to the earth next to an honest-to-goodness Joshua tree with only a single headlight to get you there and every one of the billions and billions of stars and planets God has breathed so alive tonight spearing holes of burning silver in the map of blackness behind them. Ride right into the middle of the desert darkness looking for that perfect spot in the sand. Ride and ride like you know exactly where you’re going.
16.
IT WASN’T CHRISTMAS any more, just 1966 and January and cold, the piney corpses of December 25 dumped out on every freezing curb. But in spite of the snow on all the rooftops and the slush in the streets and the razor-blade winds, everybody was back and the village was its shimmy-shaking old self again, a familiar feeling of Yorkville-imminent anticipation bubbling in the pit my stomach just like it did every time I came back.
Within three hours of my return to town I’d had a big greasy breakfast by myself at Webster’s, bought the newest Byrds album, Turn! Turn! Turn! at Record World with a pocket full of Christmas money I was determined to get rid of as quickly as possible, dropped by next door at Mont Blanc and scored a nickel bag of weed and played a game of chess with one of the waitresses, worked my way down Yorkville Avenue and st
opped in for a cup of coffee and hellos at the Purple Onion, Jacques’ Place, and the Mynah Bird, and, finally, when I couldn’t wait any longer, dropped a dime in a payphone and dialed Thomas’s number.
“Hello?”
“Thomas!”
“Buckskin!”
“Hey.”
“Hey, yourself. Let’s get together, buddy, let’s get this show of ours on the road. These fingers of mine are practically falling off from uselessness. Meet you at the studio in an hour?”
“I’m here, I’m in the village.”
“Even better. See you in ten?”
“Christine called me this morning at my parents. Her train gets in at five. I’m supposed to meet her at her place.”
“So leave her a note and tell her where we’ll be.”
“I’ll see you soon.”
“Looking forward to it, Buckskin.”
And so was I. Right up through when I’d slapped a hurriedly scribbled see-you-at-the-rehearsal-space-love-Bill note onto Christine’s door and rushed right over, icy breath like idling-car emission as I jogged the entire way. Right up until I literally had my key in the studio door.
Maybe it was the buzz of being back in the village. Maybe it was the three quick coffees. But hearing Thomas tuning up inside, the all-of-a-sudden roller-coaster ride in my stomach told my head that something wasn’t right. But I’d already turned the key in the lock, and the old warped, wooden door slowly opened up on its own power.
“Buckskin,” Thomas said, looking up from his guitar, “good to see you again, brother. And, hey, I was thinking, this is great, this works out just fine. Finally we can get a bass in the hands of that woman of yours while we’re all in the same room together. It looks like we’re actually going to get the Duckhead Secret Society off the ground after all.”
Now I remembered.
Thomas and I shook hands and stepped out onto the icy balcony and I rolled us a joint and we got caught up. I tried to pay attention, but had a few other things on my mind.
Like never having so much as even hinted to Christine how I’d had the gall to commit her to being a bass-playing backup singer in the service of Interstellar North American Music. Like having fed Thomas a steady diet of outright lies for several weeks about Christine’s bass-playing progress and her own excitement over getting down to the serious work of giving the world the jump-start to the spirit it needed. Like wondering whether hopping over the balcony and into the street might be a more effective getaway than simply running out the front door when Thomas or Christine or anybody other than stone-deaf Scotty demanded an on-the-spot demonstration of my drumming abilities.
A half an hour later Christine showed up with a long, deep kiss for me for a greeting and I rolled us another fat one and we all got caught up all over again. The weed was good; I was almost persuaded by its wonderful reason-wrecking effect that everything was going to work out wonderfully and not to worry so much because everything was going to work out just fine and not to worry so much because everything was going to work out wonderfully and ... Then Thomas sucked a last toke from the joint and flicked the fluttering roach three storeys down onto Yorkville Avenue.
“You two about ready?” he said.
Christine returned Thomas’s big smile and then some with her stoned own. “I’m already spaced, you guys go ahead. Besides, it’s freezing out here.” On her way back inside she pulled me close by the front of my jacket and gave me another long kiss, this time with enough tongue that it felt as if she was looking for something she’d lost in there. She closed the rickety French doors behind her as tight as she could to the cold and near darkness, although it was only a little after six o’clock.
Thomas put a bare hand on my shoulder. He never wore gloves, no matter how cold it got. “It’s time, Buckskin,” he said.
I tried to smile his smile back, but he could see it was only a try, not the easy real thing. He placed his other hand on my other shoulder and moved his face closer to mine.
“No BS, buddy,” he said. “Straight up, now, no humming or hawing, right on down the line. What’s troubling you?”
I didn’t know what else to say, so I told him the truth. When I was all done, had nothing else to apologize for, he dropped his arms to his sides and smiled.
How can he just smile? I thought. What the hell was there to possibly smile about? Always a tight fit out on the balcony, Thomas was facing the studio, me the street, and I watched an enormous plough push a small mountain of dirty snow up onto the curb. I knew we were opposed to traffic in the village, but were we for or against snowploughs? I didn’t know. Christine would have.
“You worry too much, Buckskin. You leave the worrying to me.”
“But Christine isn’t going to play with us, she just isn’t. Although why it has to be her and why we can’t get someone else who—”
He raised his hand for me to stop. “Miss Christine is essential. This is how it has to be.”
He peeked over my shoulder. The harsh fluorescent light inside the studio bathed his face in spite of itself almost tender, a false moonlight soft. He put an arm around my shoulder, turned me around, and creaked open the French doors.
Sitting beside Scotty at the card table, Christine welcomed me inside with crossed arms and a look of feigned amusement. The two girls on the other side of the room giggled away like toe-tickled five-year-olds and were clearly seriously baked, not to mention unseasonably miniskirted with knee-high brown suede boots and matching belly button–cropped black turtlenecks so tight to their long skinny bodies you could almost see ribs poking through the thin, dark cotton. One of them was sloppily playing around with the bass while the other unsuccessfully tried to stop her hiccuping with three fingers to her lips.
“You didn’t mention in the note you left me that I was supposed to bring a date tonight, Bill,” Christine said.
I frowned and looked to Thomas for an explanation, but he was busy showing the taller girl some chord changes on the bass.
“You know as much about this as I do,” I said, sitting down at the table.
“Oh, well, in that case, let me fill you in, then,” she said. “Jupiter—that’s Jupiter right over there in the black miniskirt, you might have noticed her already—she’s one of the go-go dancers from the Mynah Bird I was telling you about that were with Thomas the night I met him at the Riverboat, remember? Well, Jupiter is now not only a go-go dancer, she’s also the bass player in your band. In fact, considering that you two are going to be working together pretty closely over the next several months, it might be a good idea for you to go over there and get acquainted.”
“Chris—”
“No, really, the bass and drums are the backbone of any successful group, anybody can tell you that. And I bet you two are going to make one tight little rhythm section.”
“Chris—”
“Really, you should at least say hello. Jupiter,” she called out, voice all high-pitched ten-year-old false girlie, “oh, Jupiter, sweetheart, this is Bill. Bill, Jupiter.”
Jupiter slowly raised her eyes from the psychedelic miracle of all these really far-out sounds floating up from her fingertips and tried to focus. Eventually finding me in her sightlines, “Bill,” she said, her voice a 45 record playing at 33 . “Heeeyyy Biillll.”
Christine turned to me in her chair and smiled. When Scotty joined in on the grinning grilling, I’d had enough.
“Thomas,” I said, standing up, “we need to talk.”
“Just a second, Buckskin. I think Jupiter here’s almost got a handle on ‘Tiger by the Tail.’”
“Now, Thomas. Outside.” I didn’t wait around to hear his answer, went out on the balcony and waited. Before I had time to roll the doobie I was telling myself I shouldn’t, he was standing there beside me.
“What is this shit?” I said.
Hurt, offended, confused; he managed to convey all three.
“Buckskin, I don’t—”
“Oh, fuck that, man.”
&n
bsp; Just like I never used the word God unless I was almost on the point of cumming, I reserved the word man for when I was righteously pissed off.
“I know what you’re trying to do,” I said. “And not only is it not going to work, it’s screwing with my woman’s head, which means that it’s screwing with mine. If you think strapping a bass guitar onto some stoned chick—”
“You mean Jupiter?”
“Yeah, Thomas, I mean Jupiter. If you think you can make my girlfriend jealous enough to do what you want her to do and get her to join your fucking band then you’re deluded.”
“Buckskin ...”
“Don’t Buckskin me, man. And not only that, but how dare you try to come between Christine and me? There are certain things you don’t fuck around with, certain things—”
Three quick raps on the glass balcony door spun us both around. The other miniskirted girl opened up the door far enough to be heard over the wind.
“Thomas, Jupiter’s crying,” she said. “That other girl, she ... Jupiter’s crying, Thomas.”
And, sure enough, Jupiter was crying—more like shrieking, actually—as well as being slumped over the card table. She stopped sobbing long enough to look up at Thomas and me—a rainbow of dark makeup running down her face—and then began bawling all over again, burying those lovely cheekbones and lips in her folded arms on the table. Scotty stuffed his papers into his sack and grabbed his violin case.
“Peace and love, my ass,” he said.
He slammed the door shut behind him and was soon followed by the still-weeping and unsteady Jupiter, aided by her friend. Near the door Jupiter once again stopped crying and looked at Thomas. Thomas gave her the biggest grin I’d seen him deliver yet, and at this she ran out of the room howling. Her friend hesitated on the doorstep like she wanted to say something, but the sound of Jupiter clickety-clacketying down the stairs sent her running after her.
“What did you give that girl?” I said.
“Nothing I haven’t taken twenty times myself,” Thomas answered.
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