“You smell like chlorine.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Why do you smell like chlorine at five o’clock in the morning?”
“Go back to sleep, Chris.”
“Bill ...”
“Go back to sleep.”
“Bill ...”
62.
EVEN A BROKEN WHEEL can keep turning for a little while. But then Thomas got bored. To his credit, he tried not to be. But Thomas wasn’t the kind of person to tell himself what to do. Thomas did what he was. And by the time we hit San Antonio what he wasn’t was interested in our live shows any more. Truth was, I wasn’t much either. But, then, I didn’t have to stand up there in front of an audience for two hours and pretend to be. I only had to keep the beat. But he tried. You couldn’t say he didn’t try.
In Memphis, during our first-ever Deep South musical date, all at once his voice was all southern-honeyed charm. You always could tell he was from around down there, but now he sounded like he’d never left. It was a little ramshackle joint out by the airport full of white people who worked at the factories outside the city, but it was still Memphis, Tennessee. There was an organ on stage and we played every Stax-styled tune Thomas had taught us with him at the keyboard and Slippery taking over the low-tone vocal parts. Most of the songs we hadn’t performed since we left Yorkville, but by the time we got to Sam and Dave’s “You Got Me Hummin’” we really were, dishing out big fat chunks of greasy Duckhead soul, steel guitar oddly accenting every beautifully filthy vocal chop-chop, Thomas’s tripped-out rhythm changes turning around and around the R&B beat.
But every time the audience thought they knew what they were getting—basically, twang-tinged rhythm and blues pulled apart and pumped right back out by three skinny white hippies and an old man in an old suit—Thomas would avoid the tackle and outfox the defence and do a musical end run: a fuzz-drenched number like our own “Early Morning Overcast”; a plain-old hard-core country number like “She Thinks I Still Care”; a straight-ahead rock and roll chestnut like “Lucille” done up in high wah-wah style that anybody who could hear the beat and had two feet knew wasn’t black or white but only a good old boogying time. The jammed dance floor never stopped moving long enough to wonder what it was sweating to. Thomas finished things up with, “Y’all been as fine an audience as we’ve been lucky enough to play for as long as I can recall, and remember that even the itty-bittiest little animal has got rights too, you know, and peace in your city and have a good night.”
In Dallas it wasn’t the audience but us that Thomas ended up working to win over. The Lone Star Saloon was a phony country and western place with brass railings and glass coffee tables and mirrors everywhere you looked with the country-shmoltz stylings of Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold pumped over the club’s sound system. The pot-bellied men all wore big white cowboy hats and the women expensive dangling earrings in the shape of the state of Texas, but I had more country soul in the tip of one of my split ends. Thomas tried to make friends with the crowd by instructing Slippery to cool it with his Evil Kineval steel-guitar licks and guiding us through nearly an entire set’s worth of traditional country tunes played as straight as we could manage, but the audience looked almost as listless as we felt. When Thomas tried to get something going with a steel-guitar-warped version of Chuck Berry’s “Roll and Roll Music,” they went from apathetic to irate, the women staring out at the empty dance floor through slit-eyes, the men repeatedly taking off their hats and putting them back on like they couldn’t decide whether to leave them on or not while they lynched us.
Thomas announced we’d be back in fifteen minutes and shut off his mike. “Everybody inside Christopher,” he said. “We’re going for a ride.” Forty minutes later we were back for our second set with a couple of notable differences.
For starters, everybody but Slippery was righteously messed up on half a bottle of very expensive Sauzo Tres Generaciones bought at a nearby liquor store and consumed at Thomas’s insistence while we drove around looking for a store that Thomas said he’d recognize when he saw it.
Second, when we finally stepped out onto the stage in front of about half the audience that’d originally been there when we’d started, each of us—Heather in her usual spot off stage included—was wearing not only a shit-faced grin but a silver silk turban. Thomas had left Christopher running and us guessing and bought the things at some sleazy backstreet boutique. Five minutes later, in between gulps from the bottle of tequila, he passed around the turbans and explained that they were something the old R&B groups in the fifties used to wear so they’d look more East Indian than Negro and get more bookings, and that if those ignorant crackers back at the bar wanted to treat us like spades then, by God, we were going to give them what they wanted. He’d made sure that each person’s turban had his or her very own different-coloured fake jewel stuck right in the middle. By the time we got back to the club and the bottle was half empty it all made sense.
We ramshackled right in with a sloppy version of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say,” a tune we’d never even practised that Thomas walked us through out in the parking lot, and things only got funkier from there. Even when we finally played something the ten or fifteen couples left in the place recognized—one of Patsy Cline’s sugary ballads, “I Fall to Pieces”—the stinging electric guitar runs Thomas choked off every time the tune’s title was sung by everybody (off-key me included) in our highest, loudest falsettos made it sound nothing like a gentle lament to a long-lost love and everything like an unrequited psychotic’s suicide note set to molar-rattling music.
When the bar’s owner, another little man in a big hat, said he was only going to pay us half of what he was supposed to, take it or leave it, Slippery handed Heather his turban and grabbed the man by his wide collars and threw him back across the bar. “I’ve got an Arkansas mortgage to pay, Hoss,” he said. “And nobody’s taking money out of my pocket.”
We got paid, in full, and stopped at the nearest motel to continue the party, the baddest rock and rolling, country and westerning, motherfucking music-making outlaws anybody’d ever seen. At least that’s what we kept telling ourselves as we finished off a couple of six-packs of Pearl and skinny-dipped in the motel pool, the full autumn moon illuminating our silver turbans as we water-bugged around and around, careful to keep our jewelled heads aloft in the warm Texas night. Slippery, still in his suit, smoked in a recliner and kept an eye on the front desk.
Later, Christine and I even made it while everyone else waited for us at the 24-hour coffee shop next door, the first time since a brief spell of near-constant randiness on my part right after I’d started in on the coke.
In Austin, at the Broken Spoke, we played to what was just about our ideal audience. The brush-cut and big-haired two-stepping crowd was already there waiting for us, and we brought in the bizarro element ourselves by way of an interview we’d done the afternoon of the gig on a local college radio station. Colin had told us that as we got closer to our recording rendezvous with him in L.A. and our coming-out party at the Whisky A Go Go, the Electric Records people would start setting up publicity spots for us in the more knowledgeable markets.
I was taking a leak in the radio station washroom before we were supposed to go on the air when Thomas came in and dragged me into one of the stalls and practically stuffed a line up my nose. I didn’t put up any protest. The day’s inaugural snort wasn’t coming around early enough for me either. We giggled all the way down the hall like a couple of school kids sneaking a smoke in the can.
In the cramped studio the guy who interviewed us knew what he was talking about, Electric had done its homework. He wore a green headband and a STOP THE BOMBING! button on his jean jacket, but asked Thomas all about what he meant by Interstellar North American Music and how he was influenced as much by Little Richard as Hank Williams and everything else the Electric Records press release he’d received said. The interview was supposed to be with all of us, but Thomas ended up doing mos
t of the talking. The sound of him crunching on a carrot from the plastic bag he’d taken to carrying around sent the sound meters into the red, but he came across loud and clear.
“It’s all the same song. Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Doc Watson. It’s all God’s breath sung back to Him in syncopated celebration.”
“Braces and a broken recorder. Twelve years old and glasses and patches on both knees and even the chess club doesn’t want you. Hey, that’s a blues song, too. You know Paul Revere and the Raiders aren’t going to write it, so I guess it has to be us.”
“Rule number one: Unless you have something to say, don’t pick up the instrument. Thomas has always believed that deeply.”
“The kind of person who listens to our music doesn’t want to live a bit and die a little and find a friend. The kind of person who listens to our music wants to live forever and die a lot and fall in love.”
“I can’t speak for anybody else in the band, but personally, I’ve always felt like a stranger in my own house looking for a back door I haven’t gotten around to building yet. Does that answer your question?”
It probably didn’t, but it did make for damn good radio. When the interviewer concluded by asking what people who weren’t all that familiar with country music could expect from our show and Thomas answered, “Heartaches, sore feet, and fleshless Satori. And please remember to tip your waitress. They’re working girls just like the rest of us,” a few people must have decided to come on down just to see what this freak show was all about.
We never played better. Thomas got so into his “Dream of Pines” duet with Christine that he closed his eyes and waltzed around with an imaginary partner during her mandolin solo and fell off the stage and into the crowd, which thought it was all a part of the act. And the people standing at the edge—shorthairs and longhairs, truckers and tokers standing a little uneasily there side by side—caught him in their outstretched arms and pushed him back up just in time for him to sing the next verse and he didn’t miss a word.
63.
AUSTIN TO SAN ANTONIO is only about an hour and a half, A to B blacktop, straight down I-35. But time doesn’t mean anything. It might take half a second, it could take years, but once the bow has been drawn, eventually the arrow will fly. Call it hippie bullshit or common cosmic sense. Either way, by the time we were two songs into our first set at Bar l’America in San Antonio it was obvious there wasn’t going to be any inspired repeat of the Memphis or Austin or even Dallas shows before we split for L.A. Because Thomas didn’t care any more. What’s more, he didn’t care who knew that he didn’t care any more.
He wasn’t unprofessional. He just couldn’t be bothered to sing with any emotion or play his instrument with any inventiveness or put any thought into the song selection. After a while, Christine got tired of waiting around for him to signal what was next and took over counting off the next tune. Thomas didn’t mind. He was happy to play sideman. That’s the thing. He wasn’t spaced out or pissed off or surly with anyone. He just didn’t care.
It was as if the last few days had been nothing more than him running into a long-ago ex and deciding to go for a week’s worth of auld lang syne lovemaking. It wasn’t until later that I realized he was saying goodbye for the last time, too.
His father was good about it. He gave Thomas his mother’s third-generation family Bible, a $25,000 per year trust fund contingent upon him never setting foot in the state of Mississippi again, and a firm handshake. His father would make sure that Becky, away at school in Louisiana, got his letter. When Thomas came downstairs that morning with his bag, Selma had a big cry in the kitchen and gave him the silver cross from around her neck and told him to hurry along because he knew how much his father hated to be kept waiting.
Thomas shook his father’s hand and climbed aboard his Harley and terrified the birds nesting in the treetops of Dream of Pines one last time.
His father watched the dust from the dirt road and the exhaust from the bike rise and whirl and become the same thing. He called out to Lee, his mongrel hunting dog who let only him come close without grrring, and the two of them walked off together back to the house.
Later, hitting the open road along the coast near Biloxi, finally going fast enough to slow down his mind, Thomas came to the conclusion what it wasn’t.
It wasn’t about refusing to get a haircut or playing guitar in his room all day or the girls at all hours. It wasn’t about getting expelled from Harvard for missing an entire semester’s worth of classes. It wasn’t about being presented at his daddy’s doorstep more than once at four in the morning after being picked up at Charlie’s Place or the Chicken Shack or Franklin’s, the only white face in the entire joint (“And you from a good family, too, boy,” the officer in the squad car would say. “What would your momma think knowing her son was hanging around Niggertown?”). It wasn’t about his father threatening him that if he was going to throw away an opportunity at an Ivy League education then he was damn well going to take the job that was waiting for him down at the front office if he didn’t want to be looking at this house from the outside. It wasn’t about the one time his father’s name and money hadn’t mattered—midnight downtown alleyway Jackson and a gram of coke in his pocket and Thomas too messed up to talk his way out of it for once. It wasn’t about the article about the bust in the Jackson Daily News that mentioned not only Thomas’s father by name but also every one of his business affiliations. It wasn’t even about the emergency meeting of the company’s stockholders in Memphis and the not-so-subtle suggestion that Mr. Graham learn to control his nigger-loving, dope-taking, long-haired hippie son or ... or, well, Mr. Graham damn well better.
Thomas knew what it was about. It was about “Money Honey.” “Money Honey” by Jesse Stone as recorded by Elvis Presley on his self-titled first album.
The coffin was in the ground and the Reverend Wilson had said his thing and someone put a single red rose in Thomas’s hand and nudged him toward his mother’s grave. He walked to the edge of the hole and looked down inside at the polished mahogany and shiny silver latches and looked and looked and kept on looking. And when Selma came forward and placed an arm around his shoulder and clasped his rose-holding hand and gently attempted to help him let go, Thomas tightened his fingers around the flower’s stem until the thorns burst through his flesh and the blood began to flow and his brain was on fire and he finally felt awake again.
Because he was not yet as strong as his father Thomas went right to the song’s last verse, the one about money, love, and which way the wind really blows, alternately singing as loud as he could and biting down hard on the hand trying to stop him, every bowed, embarrassed, graveside head hearing every single word he sang, a trail of dripping red on the cemetery green all the way to the back seat of the Cadillac.
Thomas popped the clutch on his bike and pulled in front of a lagging transport. With any luck, he’d be in L.A. by Tuesday.
64.
“IS THIS SOME KIND of guy thing, Thomas?”
“I’d just as soon finish what I start is all, Miss Christine.”
“This isn’t a contest, you know. This isn’t about you. This is about somebody fresh taking over for a while so we end up getting to Los Angeles in one piece.”
“Oh, don’t you worry about that, Miss Christine, Thomas is going to get us all there nice and safe and sound. And before you know it, too. You just go on back to your book there and relax a spell. Here, have a carrot.”
Thomas kept one hand on the steering wheel and with the other offered his bag of carrots to the rear of the hearse; there were no immediate takers so he stuck it back between his legs with a shrug. “Y’all don’t know what you’re missing,” he said, crunching into a fresh carrot. “Plenty of beta carotene in just one of these little beauties to help your natural detoxifiers do their job.”
Christine slid her bookmark into her paperback and rolled over onto her side into a tight ball, placing her pillow squarely over her head
. The disappearing act with the pillow was a recent development.
“Mind you, now, parsley, kale, and spinach are also good sources of beta carotene. Just because Thomas is partial to carrots doesn’t mean everybody’s got to like what he likes.”
Thanks to the coke, Thomas had plenty of time to memorize lots of interesting tidbits from Christine’s The Murder of Mother Nature to generously share with us. At the moment, though, he was busy single-handedly pushing Christopher harder than was probably wise across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California so we could score two whole bonus days worth of work in the studio. Except for filling up and the infrequent do-it-and-dash pit stops Christine had to practically petition him for, the speedometer rarely dipped below seventy-five, not the coolest road plan in the world considering we were transporting several grams of cocaine across four state lines in a black hearse. The entire trip, the whole twenty-four hours, all twelve hundred miles, I never saw him once get out of his seat. I slept for a few hours here and there, so maybe I missed it. I must have. He had to go to the bathroom. And he had to blow his nose. We both had to.
I spotted a sign for an upcoming service station and poked my head into the front of the hearse. “We should probably stop here,” I said. “We’ve got less than a quarter-tank left and the sign says it’s the last Esso for forty miles.” It was sometime in the afternoon, twelve or more hours since we’d left Texas and my last snort, and I’d been bugging Thomas to pull over ever since I’d started getting a little fidgety just outside El Paso. He seemed put out even to slow down long enough to get gas, but could see the nearly horizontal needle just as well as I could. He hit the blinker and pulled over into the right lane.
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