“Just a second, dear, I’ve almost ...”
Tip-toeing on the top step of the ladder, Kelorn stretched for the bookstore’s sole copy of Robert Burns. Scotty stood beside me frowning impatiently, waiting for his book. Open-collared and tie-less, his only fashion concession to the humidity and heat, Scotty’d burst through the door that afternoon, cane first as usual, challenging us with “Let’s see what kind of commune you’re running here anyway. Robbie Burns. Eighteenth century. Anything you’ve got. My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose preferably. Go.”
Lowland Scot poetry erring a little on the sentimental side wasn’t a big mover at Making Waves, and so relegated with a few Elizabethan dramatists and the Selected Essays of Charles Lamb to a topmost cubbyhole built for some long-forgotten reason right into one of the walls. And because ladder-climbing really wasn’t among Kelorn’s many strengths, I’d told her, twice, not to worry, that I’d go up and grab the book myself. But somehow, somewhere between good intentions and actually getting my ass up the ladder, the intricacies of our tour itinerary kept me earthbound. Hey, sixty-eight hours away and counting. And did I mention that we were booked into forty-two clubs in sixty-one days?
Kelorn stopped her straining long enough to stare up at the stubborn book and then, for a moment more, down at us. “Mr. Robinson?” she said, reaching down with one hand. “May I?” Scotty got the idea right away and handed her his cane. One carefully placed poke later, the Burns came fluttering down. I caught it in mid-air, smoothed its slightly dog-eared cover, and handed it over to Scotty, all without once having to interrupt myself.
“And Colin is paying for a complete tune-up for the hearse. I mean, complete. Lube job, new filter, new spark plugs, even new tires—everything.”
Kelorn slowly climbed down from the ladder, one careful step at a time, and stood in place holding on to it for a few seconds when she eventually reached the bottom.
“Isn’t that great?” I said.
“I’m a little dizzy, Bill, just give me a moment.”
Scotty finished flipping through the paperback and put it into the pocket of his suit jacket. “I’ll have this back by Monday,” he said. Making Waves wasn’t normally a lending library, but, then, Scotty wasn’t a normal customer.
“I won’t be here Monday, Scotty, remember?” I said. “By this time Monday we’ll be pulling into Flint. The club we’re playing in isn’t actually in downtown Flint but a bit on the—”
“I’ll have this back on Monday,” he said, and shuffled out the door.
Kelorn had recovered from her climb long enough to plug in the kettle. Blazing sun or blinding snow, Kelorn needed her cup of tea.
“Shouldn’t you be getting ready for your trip, dear? Don’t you have things you need to do?”
“Nope,” I said, “I’m all set. I’ve already packed, I got my passport yesterday, and I’ve already paid my landlord two months’ rent in advance. I’ve even said goodbye to my parents. I’m all ready to go.”
One thing I was always aware of whenever I went back home was how I smelled. Not bad, necessarily—I mean, I didn’t stink, I was definitely a raised-right, wash-behind-your-ears hippie—but within the first few whiffs of sitting down on the lint-free living room couch or washing my hands in my parents’ sparkling bathroom sink I couldn’t help but notice a certain funky odour that couldn’t be coming from anyone or anything but me, scented confirmation that I didn’t fit in any more with the wall-to-wall carpeting and the perfumed toilet paper. This trip out I also noticed that I couldn’t sit still for more than two minutes straight without rapping out a beat on whatever flat surface happened to be handy and couldn’t understand why my parents both talked so incredibly slow.
Later, ducking into the washroom after dinner to pop an upper before taking Snowball for a walk with my dad, sideways slurping from the faucet to wash down the pill, I got a good look at myself in the mirror. For a second or two I considered that it might be me who was going too fast. But Snowball hated closed doors like every dog does and scratched and whimpered to let me know he already had his leash on and was way past ready to go. I turned off the tap and opened up the door and we were off.
“And Christine?” Kelorn said. “I take it she’s as excited as you are? I’m afraid I haven’t spoken to her since the night of your performance.”
“Oh, yeah, she’s excited. She’s just been busy helping out with making posters and writing letters and making phone calls and stuff. For the next round of protests. For after we’re gone. But she told me to tell you she’s going to drop by and see you before we split.”
Before we split. Like all really important decisions, nobody said anything, nothing got put down on paper, no clear consensus was reached. The only thing for sure was that we were going. We were both going.
“And has Thomas determined how he’s going to negotiate customs?” she asked.
“Thomas doesn’t need a passport,” I said. “Only Christine and Heather and I do, and even then nobody’ll probably ask to see them.”
“Yes, dear,” she said, filling up the teapot with boiling water, “but if they’re interested enough in Thomas to look for him all the way up here, they’re most certainly going to have their eyes open for him at the border. That’s why I think it’s so foolish for him to attempt to go back.” She put a single cup on the counter and dropped a tea bag in the white porcelain pot. “You did talk to Thomas about this. You did speak to him.”
I wandered off to the Ancient History section at the back of the shop and wished it wasn’t just a subject heading. “God, it’s hot in here,” I said. I wrapped my fingers around the bottom of one of the room’s two already-opened windows and yanked it upwards for all I was worth, which wasn’t much.
“My goodness, Bill, you did ...”
Kelorn didn’t finish her sentence and I didn’t turn around, just kept staring straight ahead at the wall of the house next door. Granted, it wasn’t much of a view, but it did remind me of the one back in my room. Strange what you’ll get all nostalgic about sometimes.
“But you knew how serious this all is,” Kelorn said. “What could you possibly have been thinking?”
Well, nothing, I wanted to say, I wasn’t thinking of anything. And just because it was all so serious. But Kelorn was a doer, just like Christine, and would never have understood what made a person like me who’s never worn a watch in his life tick.
“But that guy,” I said, turning around, “the RCMP guy, he never showed up the day you said he would. Has he been back?”
“No, but that’s not the point. You simply must tell Thomas what’s going on, Bill. And today, this afternoon, right now. And this Colin fellow, too, the one who’s in charge of your affairs.”
Then the door handle jiggled and the chimes tinkled and a platoon of badge-flashing Mounties didn’t rush the room. Actually, the door stayed shut. I was all set to jump out the window anyway, but Kelorn calmly came from behind the counter and opened the door.
Thomas kissed Kelorn on the cheek and handed her a bunch of yellow daisies, long, dirt-dripping roots and all, somebody’s nearby garden obviously the poorer. Through his ripped jeans, both knees were covered in fresh blood mixed up with small pebbles and black earth. He joined us in looking at the clump of dirt and flowers. The whites of his eyes were barbed-wire red.
“Yellow, yeah, that’s a colour,” he said. “It’s just one, though. There are lots of other colours you can really get your head around if you ... but yellow, yeah.” He looked at Kelorn. “Buckskin—he knows where I’m coming from. Buckskin, he’s the original Technicolor man himself. Buckskin, he’s my main man.”
Kelorn stepped out onto the porch to see if any irate neighbour with his lawn shears was on the warpath, then gently guided Thomas inside and shut the door.
“I’m going to get some hydrogen peroxide from upstairs and clean out those cuts,” she said. “Then I think you and Thomas should sit down somewhere nice and quiet and have a talk, Bill. Somewhere indoors
, preferably. Somewhere private.”
I nodded.
“C’mon, Thomas,” I said. “Let’s go hang out for a while.” I put an arm around his shoulder but he instantly stiffened.
“Sorry, brother. The time for talking’s over. We’ve got work to do. But don’t you worry. Now I know what I didn’t know before. Now I understand what has to happen.”
“Sure, that’s cool,” I said. “Let’s go to the studio and talk. And work, I mean. Let’s go there and work.”
48.
“SHHHHHHHHHH.”
“Yeah, because Kelorn, she’s ... I mean, we don’t ...”
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”
“Right.”
As usual, Thomas was right. We did need to be quiet. Because, being a little after four in the a.m., Kelorn would be asleep upstairs. And even if she wasn’t, likely wouldn’t be too thrilled with the idea of Thomas and me ripped out of our gourds on acid and bumping into the walls of the bookstore on the lookout for songwriting inspiration.
Let me explain.
I prefer the slow mellow of good bourbon and long dog walks with Monty over nervous insights these days, and this stuff is old, mostly twigs and seeds and dry as powdered bone. But let me light up, inhale, get in tune to the tale. Because sometimes sacrifices have to be made if the song is going to get sung.
49.
I’D DONE WHAT Kelorn had told me to. Well, most of it. I’d walked Thomas from the bookstore to our rehearsal space as coolly as possible—slight glitch only when Thomas loudly insisted that we stop in at the Grab Bag and purchase the store’s entire stock of cheap sunglasses and a can of whipped cream—and basically played watchdog until he gradually came down from his trip. I didn’t tell him about the RCMP, though. I decided to wait until he was together enough to understand what I was saying.
It was my first experience with an acid case face to face, and, to be honest, I was a little disappointed. Thomas sat across from me wordlessly plucking away at his guitar like I wasn’t even there and unsuccessfully attempting to get through the same song, a sort of a cross between “Green Sleeves” and “Bo Diddly” (believe it), always tripping up on the same intricate middle section. Aside from trying on and discarding every one of the twelve pairs of black shades before he began playing, I realized that with a song running through his head Thomas zonked wasn’t all that different from Thomas straight and that he probably wasn’t going to start flapping his arms like a chicken and jump out the window any time soon. After a solid hour of this I began pacing the room, occasionally stepping out on the balcony, hoping to see Christine down below tacking up some posters. She never showed.
On the card table I spotted Scotty’s borrowed copy of Robert Burns. I flipped and skimmed until the rhymes on the page and Thomas’s repetitive chord changes worked together to put me under. I dreamed of an undisturbed and endless coal-black river and woke to the sound of a chair scraping across the floor.
Except for the green volume levels of the reel-to-reel, the room was completely dark. I must have slept while the sun set and fell. Thomas flipped a switch on the tape machine, returned to his chair, and played the tune he’d been working on all the way through—flawlessly this time—then stood up and clicked the thing off.
“Sorry about the delay,” he said, as if he’d just popped back from a quick trip next door. “But I had to take care of that before we could get started.”
“No problem.” He seemed like he was all right now, eyes not pinwheeling in their sockets any more and speaking in full sentences. “How do you feel?”
“Fine, fine,” he said. He put a hand in his pocket and pulled out a white tab. “You ready to get going?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about getting down to business, Buckskin. About getting down to work. You’re the Colour Man, no question about that, but everybody can use a little inspiration from time to time.” He jiggled the tab in his palm.
“I think you’ve worked enough for today,” I said. “And if you think I’m going to volunteer for the same deal I just babysat you through, you’re still more spaced out than I thought.”
He didn’t protest, didn’t say a word; just nodded like he’d expected to hear what I’d said and returned the acid to his pocket. Then promptly announced that what he really wanted was a cup of fresh, hot coffee and a roast beef sandwich with mayonnaise and onions and tomatoes and salt but no pepper. He checked his pocket for his wallet and started for the door.
“Hold on,” I said.
He looked and sounded like himself again, but I didn’t want to run the risk of having to deal with the fallout from any flashback freakout in the street, not with him holding another dose and who knew what else. Plus, it was probably safe to lay the story of his fugitive status on him now, and I wasn’t in any hurry.
“Give me some cash and I’ll go,” I said.
He shrugged, pulled a ten out of his wallet, and repeated his order. Sitting down at the table to wait, picking up the Robert Burns, “Hey, pick yourself up something to sustain you for a spell, too.”
Which I did. An egg salad sandwich and my own cup of coffee to go. I handed Thomas his change and sat down at the studio table. He excused himself to go to the washroom down the hall and took his own brown bag with him. I slowly peeled the waxed paper from my sandwich.
The Mynah Bird had great takeout, but, of late, also a guy outfitted in only a white chef’s hat, Yorkville’s first and only nude cook. I tried not to think of him buttering my bread or laying on my lettuce.
Back, “What y’all got there, egg salad?” Thomas said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Damn.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I set down my sandwich. “What?”
“Nothing. It’s just that if I would’ve known that what you were getting was going to smell so darn good I guess I would’ve ...”
“Here,” I said, pushing mine over. I took his still-bagged roast beef.
I figured Thomas needed food in his stomach more than I needed to maintain my if-you-can-pet-it-you-shouldn’t-eat-it line of thinking. And Christine, after all, wasn’t there to help keep me in line. I took a big bite of flesh and bread.
“Over here,” I said.
“Shhhhhhhhhh.”
“Here it is.”
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”
“Right.”
I dragged Making Waves’ hardback edition of The Collected Works of William Shakespeare off the shelf. Thankfully, one of the lower shelves. If it was on one of the higher ones I might have had to levitate up there. Not that I wasn’t pretty sure I could make it, but I’d only realized I was capable of flight less than six hours before when the acid had kicked in. The acid stuck inside Thomas’s sandwich. The acid he’d spiked me with.
Because I hadn’t known I’d been dosed until I felt the first gentle loosening of the screws to the top of my head, my brain eventually agreeably spread like thick globs of peanut butter all over the walls of the studio, I hadn’t had a chance to be justifiably enraged. If I’d felt compelled to say anything to Thomas at that point it probably would have been thanks. But I hadn’t felt obliged to say a word. Or do or think anything. It was almost the entire opposite of what I’d always heard about LSD. You know: visions, epiphanies, twelve-hour full-body workouts of the soul, that sort of thing. Not me. Uh uh. I’d just wanted to stare at my foot. In particular, my right foot. A lot of people in Yorkville were starting to mess around with meditation and talking Zen and aspiring toward the sweet serenity of nothingness, and here I’d found nirvana in the middle of a roast beef sandwich.
“Come on, back here,” I said, guiding Thomas toward the rear of the shop.
We sat down side by side on the springless couch. “Where do we start?”
“At the beginning,” Thomas answered, leaning forward, plugging in a recent addition to our arsenal of equipment, a small, portable tape machine.
�
��Right.”
He switched a couple of buttons to the ON position, adjusted a few knobs, and softly but clearly out came the first of the fourteen tunes he’d performed for me back at the studio.
Even though the acid was bona fide Owsley, it turned out he’d only given me half a hit, cut the dosage in two. After generously allowing me an hour or so for uninterrupted foot absorption, Thomas decided I was sufficiently turned on to listen to what he’d been busy with for the last several months.
Acoustic guitar, electric guitar, banjo, organ; carefully selecting the instrument each number required, Thomas played every one of his new songs for me from start to finish, all the tunes he hadn’t let anybody listen to up to now. Some were as screaming anxious as the single one I’d heard before, the nervous-sounding thing I’d walked in on a few weeks back; some were mashed-potato cloudy, willowy white gentle; others were just kaleidoscope freaky (here more deep-bruise purple, there more snot-green olive). After every one he’d get up, stop the tape machine, sit back down in the metal chair across from me with his notebook and pen at the ready, and say, “Okay, what do you see?” And I’d tell him what I saw. And he’d write it down.
At around three in the morning he played me his last song, the one he’d been struggling with before, the “Green Sleeves” ditty with the shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits beat. But I didn’t say anything this time, only sat there with that brain-itchy funny feeling you get sometimes when you know there’s something you want to remember but have no idea what. Then my eye caught on the Robert Burns on the table.
“Hold on a second,” I said. I flipped until I found what I wanted.
“Flow Gently, Sweet Afton.”
Thomas put pen to paper but looked right back up. “Come again?”
“But that’s not it. That’s not my dream.”
“Steady now, Buckskin, we’re almost there, just one more song to go. What dream?”
“While you were playing this same song this afternoon I was reading this book and fell asleep. And dreamt about this river.”
Moody Food Page 18