“I thought you were going home to bed,” I said.
“The wrong colours. You said it yourself, Buckskin. You’ve inspired me.”
He slapped me on the back and headed back up the dark hallway.
40.
NO LONGER MAROONED together at Christine’s after she’d convinced penny-pinching Slippery that now that he was bringing in some steady dough it was only fair that he vacate my apartment for a tiny room in the basement of the building where our studio was, usually I crashed at my place and she at hers. Incredibly, both her bed and mine had shrunken somehow in the time since we’d started going out, had gotten narrower, shorter, less capable of accommodating two comfortably. Strange, strange science.
After our gigs Thomas would usually drop Christine off first. Leone let us leave most of our gear behind on stage under a few thin sheets of long black tarp, so at least we didn’t have to finish up the evening unloading Christopher any more. I’d kiss her good night and through the hearse’s back window watch her vanish behind her front door, which out of firm anarchist principles was never locked. The June streets of Yorkville would be still very much alive and shaking at one o’clock in the morning, and everywhere I looked there’d be summer-browned, half-naked bodies all tangled up together in lip-locking twos lusting to become ones, everybody but me falling in love for the very first time.
Once, after I’d gotten home and was already undressed and under the sheets, I stubbed out the joint I was smoking, threw my jeans back on, and barefooted it down to the payphone at the corner a couple of minutes away. I slid in my dime, blinked at the numbers for a few seconds, then slowly rested the receiver back in its place.
I played with Christine on stage almost every night. I saw her practically every day. Had, for the last year. Sometimes I’d look at her face and it was like I wasn’t even looking at somebody else, just the female version of me. And here I couldn’t remember her fucking phone number. I stared up at the full moon through the smudged glass of the phone booth and tried to concentrate. But the harder I tried to remember, the more it felt like I’d never known what it was in the first place. It was a warm night, the trees in the backyards at the end of the street swaying in summer fullness in the soft breeze, but my toes started to feel cold standing on the cement slab lining the bottom of the booth.
I walked back to my room and kneeled down by the window. I looked and looked, but the moon never showed up. I told myself I really had seen it, and not ten minutes before. I dragged the pillows and blankets from the bed to the floor and fell asleep with my jeans on.
41.
THERE WAS NO WAY either of us could have turned back, even if we’d wanted to. At best, all we could have done was pretend. But Thomas came out of the front door of the Park Plaza Hotel at the very instant I walked by. There wasn’t enough time to lie.
He stared at the sidewalk while I watched the traffic stop and start along Bloor. “You going to the show?” he said.
Local boys made good, the Ugly Ducklings, were riding “Nothin’,” currently number eight on the CHUM Chart Top Ten, into a spot opening for the Rolling Stones that night at Maple Leaf Gardens. I was meeting Christine and Kelorn and we were all walking over together. And Heather. I was supposed to meet up with Heather, too.
“Maybe,” I said. “You?”
“Think I’ll head over to the studio,” he said. “Still trying to put those colours you were talking about into some kind of order.”
He served over one of his all-is-well-in-the-universe smiles but I didn’t return the volley, let the pathetic little effort dribble right past me. I’d been looking forward to tonight for weeks, had kept it quietly circled in my mind as the one day I could kick back with several thousand long-haired friends and not think about anything Duckhead-related. And now I’d have to spend the entire time with some sham smile pasted to my face every time I looked at Thomas’s freshly cuckolded girlfriend.
“Anything you want me to say to Heather when I see her?” I said. Fuck it. Why did everything have to be about Thomas?
“Buckskin,” he said, “it’s like this—”
I raised a hand to deflect the flurry of bullshit I knew was bound my way. “I don’t want to hear it, man,” I said. “This is between you and Heather, it’s got nothing to do with me.” Then why did I feel so guilty? I thought.
He nodded without looking up.
“Just make sure Heather doesn’t find out, all right?” I said. “I don’t want to think what’d happen if she knew.” Thomas nodded his head a couple more times. There wasn’t anything left for either of us to do but go our own way.
As soon as I crossed the lights onto Avenue Road I cut over to Victoria College, where we’d said we’d meet up. And sure enough, there they were, Christine, Kelorn, and Heather, all three of them sitting side by side on the steps of the college, big grins on their sunshined faces, each of them holding a red plastic bubble-blower in her hand. They saw me coming and waved but kept pumping out their lazy, soapy circles. So many bubbles filled up the air around them, for a second or two it seemed like the sky wasn’t there.
42.
BY THE END OF SEPTEMBER Christine decided it was high time that everybody we knew from Yorkville finally get a chance to hear what we’d been up to. Not even Kelorn had checked us out yet. From the beginning, Thomas had been adamant that Heather (of course) and Scotty (whenever he felt like it) be the only people from the village allowed to make the scene, claiming that the band was like a picture that wasn’t finished yet and that there’d be plenty of time later for everybody to see us once the paint had dried properly and the thing got hung at precisely the right angle.
This time, though, Thomas had no problem at all with the idea, didn’t even think twice.
“Why, that’s just fine, Miss Christine,” he said, driving us all home.
“What about next Saturday?” Christine said. “That’ll give us time to spread the word and maybe even put up some signs.”
“Think of all the extra foot traffic,” I added, trying to help her clinch the deal. “Leone’ll be ecstatic.”
“Sure, sure,” Thomas said. “Whatever y’all say. Sounds great.”
Christine arched a puzzled eyebrow my way but was soon lost in Yorkville-postering plans with Heather. I watched Thomas pull the bottle of Desbutols from his shirt pocket, gobble down a handful right from the jar, cap it, and put it back, all without once taking his eyes off the road. I wasn’t surprised he was suddenly so agreeable about letting whoever wanted to listen to us come on out, and neither should Christine or anybody else have been. But, then, not everybody had the benefit of the observatory of my drum kit.
At the end of every set I’d watch him put down his guitar before the last note had barely faded away and scoot off to take his pick from one of several empty tables. There, he’d whip out his drugstore notepad from his back pocket, equal parts humming to himself and gnawing away at the end of his Bic pen while running his fingers through his hair over and over until break was finished, oblivious to Heather, the draft beer she’d dutifully placed before him, and everything else going on in the room. Something was on his mind these days, and it sure wasn’t all the new ways he planned to bowl them over at the Canada Tavern.
As usual, by the end of the night there was only Thomas and me left in the hearse. I’d slide into Slippery’s spot up front and Thomas would let the engine idle for a couple of minutes in front of my place and we’d yak a bit about that night’s gig. Lately we’d just sit and listen to the motor run and the sounds of two o’clock in the morning up and down Huron Street. Tonight, two dogs wouldn’t stop their back-and-forth backyard jawing, neither one willing to let the other get in the last bark. I thought about Snowball and how at this very instant he’d be a ball of white fur fast asleep on the tattered old couch downstairs in my parents’ rec room. I yawned and thought I might get some decent Zs myself for a change.
Hand on the door handle, “Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow night,” I sa
id.
Thomas clicked off the ignition. Somebody yelled at one of the dogs to shut up but the animal still had things to say, kept right on howling.
“Be patient,” he said. “I just need a little more time.”
In the street light, the hard frown he wore these days seemed even more pronounced, not like he was angry about something, but more like he was busting his brain trying to wrap it around some monster algebra problem. Behind his back Christine had taken to referring to the thick ridge of furrowed flesh between his eyebrows as “Thomas’s devil horns,” as a kind of gentle warning when she’d found out I was sharing his dealer. But I knew it wasn’t about the drugs. The drugs were the chicken. Or the egg. Anyway, the part that doesn’t come first.
“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “The new songs’ll come when they come. In the meantime, it’s not like we’re hurting for material. And it’s not like the old songs are old songs. I mean, we’ve only been playing them for how many months now? Three? Four?”
He turned the key, the hearse’s engine roaring back to life.
“Get some sleep, Buckskin.”
43.
FRONT TO BACK, shoulder-to-shoulder packed; with tie-dye, with ponytails, with Indian love beads, with army-surplus jackets, with purple headbands, and, in spite of Leone’s fiat, the pungent smell of freshly rolled marijuana. Christine had done her usual wonderful job of rallying the troops, and my initial fears about the Canada Tavern locals not taking well to the annexing of their homeland were put to rest by the time we hit the stage at a little after nine. Normal is always what the majority wears and says and does, and tonight that meant lots and lots of long hair, “Hey, man”s, and hugs.
Leone quickly discovered he wasn’t going to make a fortune on drinks—hippies don’t drink; they sip and space and munch—and jacked up the price of potato chips, pretzels, and french fries. Leone ignored the trail of sweet smoke that crept out of the bathroom every time somebody opened the door, and none of our friends said anything but thanks when the price of a bag of chips made its way from a dime, to fifteen cents, all the way up to a quarter by the end of the night. The Americans and the Russians threatening to Cold War us all to death should have gotten along half as well.
Even Thomas seemed renewed by the full house. After he counted off the start to our usual opener, “Dundas West,” the enormous roar that leapt up to embrace my boom-chick-a-boom drumming intro was definitely out of the ordinary, stunning Thomas enough that he flubbed the tune’s opening chords. After the song was over and the room didn’t go completely nose-blowing-in-the-back-row-painfully-audible quiet as usual, Thomas swivelled around and grinned first at me and then at Christine like he wanted to thank us for reminding him of something. He turned back to the audience.
“Hey, Yorkville,” he said, “nice of y’all to drop in.” Wild applause. Thomas scanned the room.
“The last time I saw this many hippies together in one place, I was in jail.” Loud laughter, more ecstatic cheering. Up until tonight Thomas had been pretty much all business between tunes, quietly thanking the audience for their imaginary applause or announcing the break with the same, “Thank you, we’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“This next one’s called ‘Walk with Your Feet,’” he said. “And if y’all feel like dancing a spell, I don’t think Leone’ll mind too much.” Thomas strummed his guitar. Mouth tight to the microphone, in a soft, clear voice, “One, two, three, four ...”
“Walk with Your Feet,” indeed, and a pounding thunderstorm full of a whole lot more. And boy, oh boy, did it ever come down.
During Slippery’s already smoking solo on “One O’clock in the Morning” Thomas crouched low and stuck his nose so close to the neck of the steel guitar and the old man’s string-bending fingers that it was as if Slippery didn’t have any say in the matter any more, his hands simply had to find a way to move that chrome bar faster. Slippery’d played more gigs than every musician in the room combined, but the whoops and whistles he received for each searing run he ripped out of his instrument and tossed into the crowd made him play even harder. I watched him bear down on the steel like I’d only seen him do before over a bottle of whisky. When a strand of black hair fell free from its carefully Vaselined place and he didn’t push it back once the song at hand was over, I knew we were now officially somewhere I, at least, had never been before.
The set list was history by now, Thomas calling out for one table-thumping scorcher after another. But he and Christine, with a little help from Slippery on the low parts, still weaved their voices in, around, and on top of each other like a funky backwoods church choir intent on keeping the melody to an out-of-control jackhammer. Unbelievable. Thomas had the hippist of Toronto’s hippies bopping up and down on the dance floor like a bunch of Coca-Cola–buzzed teenagers at a sock hop.
Thomas exchanged his Fender for an acoustic.
“We’d like to do one for you now about a place that’s a long, long way away and a long time back. I know everybody’s been there, though.” Strum, strum. “Maybe this’ll help take you back there for a spell.”
Thomas had his own microphone in front of him and Christine hers in front of her, but he walked over to where she was, looked into her eyes, and without a word they launched a cappella into “Dream of Pines,” Thomas’s bittersweet ode to his birthplace. We’d never performed it like this before, but somehow Slippery and I knew what to do anyway. Waiting until the first verse was over, Slippery with soft puffs of smoky pedal steel and me with quiet brush accompaniment joined in with Thomas’s guitar and Christine’s softly throbbing bass. I must have heard the song a hundred times before—the thing was practically part of my DNA by now—and I’d never once been to Jackson, Mississippi, but tonight the only way I could get rid of the ache in my throat and make sure I didn’t screw up the beat was to try to remember all the teams in the NHL’s newly created Western conference.
The applause for “Dream of Pines” started at the back of the room—hesitant, scattered at first, then steady, and finally roaring—eventually pouring over all of us up on stage. Walking back to the other side, “That one’s for my Uncle Pen,” Thomas said into his own microphone. “Although I can hear him saying to me just as sure as I’m looking at y’all, ‘Why, that’s right nice, boy, but do you know any Merle Haggard songs?’”
Well, I laughed. And so did Christine and Heather. And I thought I saw Slippery smile. Of course, it helped that we actually knew who Merle Haggard was.
“Well, we’re gonna do a Merle Haggard song for you now. Just in case Uncle Pen’s listening.”
And we did. And an electrified Leadbelly country blues, a George Jones weeper, and two of Thomas’s most dirge-like ballads after that. With betrayal on his lips and a guitar in his hands, he could make a broken heart seem like an attractive option. The Age of Aquarius never knew what hit it.
And neither did I when I happened to notice a girl in red hip-hugging pants with long, straw-yellow hair parted in the middle and an exposed midriff slowly dancing by herself by the left side of the stage and looking at me every time I glanced up and over at her long enough to feel guilty. Because this girl wanted to fuck me. Not because she’d found out I was funny and sweet and easy to talk to and that once she got to know me I was sort of cute in my own way and—No. This girl wanted to fuck me.
Of course, it wasn’t really me she wanted to fuck; it was the drummer. She wanted to fuck the guy up there on stage all lit up in the hot white light laying down the beat that was keeping her body swaying back and forth all night long. She wanted to fuck me because I was in THE BAND. And because I was in THE BAND, I could do anything I wanted with her and to her and that would be exactly what she wanted me to do, too. And, you know, I never got much of that sort of thing growing up in Etobicoke. Never got much of that sort of thing at all.
Finishing up the first set with a killer country-waltz version of an old gospel tune, “Farther Along” (Christine turning a few heads with her tasty mandolin
work), Thomas called us together and said he wanted to try “Barney, No,” a tune we’d rehearsed only maybe a half-dozen times during sound checks. Of all the new songs he’d been working on since we’d begun our residency at the Canada Tavern, “Barney, No” was the only one Thomas had apparently found words for and let us actually hear. To this day I have no idea what it’s about, although a dog getting into things he shouldn’t is as good a guess as any.
Thomas turned the acoustic guitar duties over to Slippery and took the lead on a Chet Atkins Country Gentleman which, by monkeying around with the volume pedal and tone bar, ended up sounding something like a cross between a reverb-laden steel guitar and a naked woman two-stepping out of her black lace panties.
“Don’t anybody go anywhere,” Thomas said. “It isn’t a party until somebody gets their heart broken.”
O...kay. I could hear the collective crunch of Christine’s roommates knitting their eyebrows over that one. Leone plugged the jukebox back in and “Paperback Writer” blasted throughout the room. Half the audience got up for their first refill of the night while the other half looked for a safe place to light up.
After our seven-thirty sound check the band normally headed out to Christopher and passed around a single joint behind the black curtains as a sort of pre-gig cerebrum-calming calisthenic. During break, though, we all pretty much went our own way, Thomas with Heather across the table from him scratching away at his notebook in lyricless frustration, Slippery smoking a couple of cigarettes by himself by the back door, staring up at the moon, me and Christine going for a walk around the block. But not tonight. Kelorn was the first one to greet us as we stepped off the stage. The others drifting off into other congratulatory embraces, Kelorn took me by the hand to have all to herself.
Moody Food Page 15