Moody Food

by Ray Robertson

  But now he’s nearly nine and the horse has been put out to pasture for some time. Every day that Thomas comes home from school and opens up the door to his room he sees it frozen stiff by his bedroom window but it rarely ever registers. Lollipops and training wheels and rocking horses. Thomas isn’t a kid any more. Next spring he’s going to be starting quarterback in Pop Warner if he practises taking snaps and throwing spirals to Fat Man Jones long and hard enough. Coach Slaughter says he’s got all the natural ability in the world. All he has to do is apply himself, he says.

  But sometimes, usually just after midnight when everyone’s bedroom door is shut tight for the night, Thomas’s mother will open her eyes and lie there in the dark and listen to her son riding his horse.

  The first time she heard it, she’d been so terrified there was a prowler loose in the house she’d decided it was worth risking her husband’s wrath by waking him up to get his shotgun and go look. But on her way down the hallway to his bedroom she passed by Thomas’s and realized that the sound she’d been hearing was the noise of her son’s rocking horse. More frightened of what his father would do to him if Thomas woke him up than she had been of the imaginary trespasser, Thomas’s mother opened up his door all set to give him his marching orders right back to bed.

  She called out his name in a loud whisper but knew instantly that he was sound asleep. The light of the moon coming through the third-storey window was all she had to go by, but his bare feet were where they were supposed to be and both hands gripped the wooden handles and his eyes were definitely wide open. Open but sightless. Full-speed rocking, his pyjamaed bottom raised an inch or two off the saddle, Thomas leaned into his horse like a desperate jockey at the finish line. Except this rider never got to the end, just kept riding and riding.

  His mother quietly shut the door. After looking in on her husband and being reassured by his thankfully oblivious snoring, she went back to her own room, took off her housecoat and slippers, and slipped back underneath the sheets. It was March and the window was open halfway. Lying there listening to Thomas’s rocking, to the pure, perfect motion of his blind midnight race, she noticed the wind chimes on the veranda tinkling in the night’s soft wind.

  Later, as spring turned into summer and everyone else in the house could only fall asleep to the loud whir of an electric fan, Thomas’s mother would go to bed aided only by a wide-open window so that when she awoke when Thomas would start his rocking, the sound of it and the wind chimes together would keep her company throughout the long, hot night.

  76.

  THOMAS STARTED TO TURN GREEN. Thomas started to turn orange. And the scariest part of all was that none of us said anything. Not to him or to each other. Heather might have taken him aside and said something on her own about him morphing into a human bruise, but I doubt it. And maybe that’s the worst thing about coke. No one talks.

  Cocaine is like any other drug—is like any other anything—what you gain one way, you lose in another. Coked-up people get done yesterday what needs to get done today, but coked-up people don’t have time for small talk. Even people not coked-up themselves but who hang around people who are coked-up end up catching the same silent drug bug. And tunnel vision is a wonderful thing for taking you places, just don’t expect to remember much of what the scenery looked like along the way once you get there.

  77.

  IT WAS COLIN’S JOB to be together enough to always have enough time, though, and he did say something to Thomas. He also handed him a slip of paper and told him to go see a doctor he knew who was experienced in dealing with people in the entertainment industry. When Thomas predictably replied that he felt fine and, besides, was too busy right now, Colin threatened to shut down recording until he got himself looked after by a professional. This wasn’t about selling records, he said, this was about making sure a friend took care of his health. Plus, he pointed out, we started back up at the Whisky in two days and it just wouldn’t do to have Thomas, unintentionally or not, radically reconfiguring his image. It might confuse our core audience.

  The only time the doctor could work Thomas in was eleven o’clock the next day. Naturally, Heather went along for the ride and Slippery hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign outside his door, leaving Christine and me on our own. It was our first free day since we’d landed in town.

  I woke up in a tangle of cool blue sheets with a naked girl lying beside me on her stomach, raised chin in her hand, with one bare leg lifted in the air and a look in her eye that said she knew what she wanted and was used to getting it. Then I woke up. I woke up in a tangle of cool blue sheets with Christine still in her clothes from the night before, still asleep flat on her back on top of her half of the blankets, mouth wide open and a most audible snore rattling from her nose.

  I looked over my shoulder at the alarm clock and saw it was just after eleven-thirty. I felt like a kid sleeping in late because school was cancelled. I shimmied over closer to Christine and kissed her softly at the base of her neck. She smelled like stale cigarettes and cold sweat but I didn’t care. Stolen days always seem more alive.

  I felt her body stir and slightly stiffen upon waking up, then relax and move into mine once consciousness kicked in and she realized where she was and what was happening.

  “This is a nice wake-up call,” she said.

  I let my hands go where they wanted and moved my lips to her ear. A couple of minutes later I felt her breathing turn into a steady, heavy rise and fall and she turned over onto her side and pushed her lips into mine and dug her fingers into the flesh of my ass, pulling my groin into hers.

  Somehow—when it’s good, it’s always somehow—she was as naked as I was and I was on top and we were doing what I’d almost forgotten we used to be so good at doing.

  My God, I thought, why the hell aren’t we doing this every day?

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Christine said, hand around my neck, pulling me to her, biting my upper lip.

  Well, I thought I’d thought it. Whatever, it was the first time we’d been in agreement about anything important in what felt like forever. Christine put her hands on my chest and gently pushed me over, wordlessly so careful both of us that I stayed inside as she got on top.

  Upright and rooted, she closed her eyes and moved her hips and made both of us happy. When the phone rang once, twice, ten times, neither of us even bothered to say not to get it. I lay back with my head on the pillow and watched Christine momentarily flutter her eyes half-open and register the alarm clock on the side table. And then shut them again and go back to pleasantly grinding away. And then flash them wide and double-check the time on the clock and leap off my hard-on like a rodeo rider with the world’s biggest burr in her saddle.

  “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong?” I said.

  “The alarm must not have gone off,” she said, hopping into her panties, then sitting down on the side of the bed to pull on her jeans.

  “It didn’t go off because we’re not recording today, remember?”

  “You mean you didn’t set the alarm? Bill, I told you I had to meet Lee and Emily at eleven to ... Shit, that must have been them calling. I knew I should have answered.”

  Now that, I admit, hurt. And I didn’t care how good she looked sitting there naked except for her faded jeans.

  “You didn’t say anything about having to meet them,” I said. “And I didn’t set the alarm because I thought we were going to spend some time together today. I guess I should have known better.”

  Christine stood up from the bed and looked down at me still lying there in all my manly glory. I pulled the sheet up to my waist.

  “You know,” she said, “even if I wasn’t an hour late for a very important meeting, I don’t think I’d want to go near that. And I really don’t think you should either.”

  “Go near what? The fact that hanging out with your girlfriends is more important than keeping your word to me.”

  “Bill, we didn’t have any plans for today. None. We didn’t h
ave any plans for today, yesterday, tomorrow, or for the last year, for that matter.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe we should have.”

  “Maybe we should have. But that’s kind of beside the point right now, don’t you think?”

  “So what you’re basically saying is that your dyke friends are more important to you than us.”

  She raised her right hand like she was going to either make some pivotal point or hit me with a karate chop, then dropped it to her side and walked away.

  “So it’s true, then, right?”

  She still didn’t say a word, kept stalking around the room kicking away dirty clothes on the floor while looking for the KEEP THE STRIP OURS T-shirt she’d helped design.

  “Are you fucking one of them? Is that it?”

  She covered her breasts with two cupped hands and kept searching.

  “Both of them? Are you fucking both of them?”

  Christine finally found her T-shirt underneath the kicked-off bedspread and tugged it on and turned around and pointed right at me with a shaking finger. “I will not talk to you when you’re like this.”

  “Like what? On to you? On to you and your dyke friends?”

  “You know I haven’t said anything before because if that’s what you want to do with your life then go ahead, do it, but I’m not going to stand here and be subjected to—”

  “You realize I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Bill. Just because you’re destroying your brain with that shit doesn’t mean everyone else is, too.”

  She jammed on her combat boots and did them up in what must have been record time, military or civilian. She slammed the door shut and didn’t leave a number where she could be reached.

  I probably could have made the elevator with her, but the stare I got from the Spanish maid pushing her cart down the hall made me realize I was only wearing a sheet. I raced back inside our room and threw on my jeans and took the stairs.

  All those laps I’d been doing in half of America’s hotel swimming pools paid off because I hit the sidewalk in my bare feet not ten yards behind her. When she saw me coming she caught the tail end of a green light and bolted for the other side of the street. I stood there for a minute waiting for a break in the noon-hour L.A. traffic, but could see that Christine was getting away and had her hand in the air to hail a cab. I made my move and was nearly across when a white van slammed on its brakes so as not to hit me, putting its driver halfway up the dashboard with his face smudged right to the windshield. The guy behind the wheel craned his neck out the window.

  “Jerk!” he yelled.

  “Fuck you!” I said, head somewhat aware that I should be apologizing but body already one full step ahead.

  “Fuck you!” he hurled back.

  “No, fuck you!” I answered.

  Traffic snarled behind the stopped van. But before he could get out or I could make a move closer, Christine was in the middle of it all and grabbed me by my arm and hauled me off to the other side of the street. Traffic began to move again, the guy in the van predictably shot me the finger, and one more “fuck you” was exchanged on both sides.

  “Man, what a clown,” I said.

  Christine looked at me as if partly in disbelief that this half-naked fool could be the same man she’d shared her bed with for the last eighteen months and partly doubting whether she had done the right thing by saving me from doing battle in the middle of the intersection with the van man.

  Sensing this, “He almost ran me over!” I said.

  “You were running across the road against a red light, Bill. In your bare feet.”

  “Only because I was trying to talk to you.”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Yeah? Then how come you came and got me then?”

  I folded my arms across my chest like I’d just made the eleventh-hour point that would set my client free when all hope had seemed lost. Might have even smirked a little, too.

  “Bill, don’t you think that the fact that you and Thomas are the only ones who believe that that stuff we waste our time on every day in the studio is anything even close to music is proof enough that you need help? That you both need help?”

  “Waste our time? You’re kidding, right? You heard Colin last night. We’re talking about the Byrds, Chris, the fucking Byrds. Colin thinks—”

  “Colin! Bill, just think about this for a second, okay? Slow down and really think. Why do you think we have to sneak behind Colin’s back and wait for him to go home every night to record Thomas’s new songs? Because Thomas thinks he’ll like them?”

  “So it’s going to take time,” I said. “Colin’s not ready yet. A lot of people aren’t ready yet.”

  “But you and Thomas are.”

  “Yeah, we are.”

  “And isn’t that a coincidence.”

  “What? What’s a coincidence?”

  “That you two are also the only ones coked out of your minds half the time.”

  Christine put up her hand, a cab stopped, she got in, and then she was gone. The window was tinted and rolled all the way up so I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw her wave goodbye.

  78.

  IT’S NOT LIKE THE idea had never crossed my mind. Towelling off poolside at the Marmont at dawn, sitting on the toilet staring up at the same two lines of graffiti on the bathroom stall wall at the recording studio, lying in bed waiting for the Nebutols to kick in and cloud my brain and cut my body’s ignition and allow me a few hours rest, sure, the notion flickered there in front of my eyes once or twice. That Thomas and I were on the same musical wavelength only because we were both plugged into the same white-powder power source was possible, I supposed.

  But no. Ultimately, no. Because the music was good. Moody Food was good. It was great. I knew it was great—even in the piecemeal bits and chunks we were slowly laying down—because I kept seeing colours. Granted, these particular colours tended to flash on and off and, even when they were in focus, were mostly strange blends of hues and tints I didn’t have any name for. And sometimes, if Thomas was being more than usually exacting and things were going especially slowly—Christine gritting her teeth to keep from saying anything, Slippery staring at his bored reflection in the glass of the sound booth—they weren’t even colours at all, just grainy images like in an old black-and-white movie where you can tell the colour of the heroine’s hair although you can’t say you actually see it. But they were there. Underneath the band-saw scream of the distortion pedal Thomas had rigged up to Slippery’s pedal-steel guitar and the forty-seven takes it took to get a ten-second harmony part done, they were there.

  Good doesn’t grow old. Bach isn’t passé and neither are California redwoods and neither is Moody Food. And if anybody thinks I’m just an old hippie who’s sucked too many peace pipes and has delusions of moody glory, come on down and visit me and Monty in Tilbury sometime and lend a hand mailing off the sixty or seventy orders a month I get for the Moody Food CD I sell out of my house. Mostly they come from the U.S. and Canada, but I’ve had requests from as far away as England, Australia, and Germany, and there’s even a steady trickle of interest in Amsterdam. Look me up at www.duckheadsecret.com and see what all the fuss is about for yourself.

  Because that’s right, yeah, I’m all grown up now and have joined the other side and got my own Web site. Where you can sample a few tunes and download the lyrics to “Some Good Destruction” written in Thomas’s own hand and see some pictures of Thomas all done up in his white Nudie jacket and shades sitting on the hood of Christopher and of all of us playing on stage together at the Whisky. I’m the first and last disciple of Thomas Graham and I take Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  There were only two stalls in the studio john and I always took the second one. Human nature, I guess, to call somewhere home even if it’s the same seat in a classroom or a bathroom. Anyway, sitting there with my
pants wrapped around my ankles was one of the few times a day when I’d be alone long enough to wonder whether Christine and the rest of the world weren’t right and Thomas and I weren’t just a drugged-out Don Quixote and his equally spaced but faithful percussionist Sancho Panza. Then my eye would fall on the couple of lines of blue ink neatly penned on the wall.

  THE LIZARD KING

  CAN DO ANYTHING

  Of course, now everybody knows all about the Doors’ resident poet’s reptile fixation, but at the time I couldn’t tell whether it was Morrison’s or Thomas’s doing. Sitting there listening to the toilet next door gurgle and run, I figured both of them were up to it. Either way, it did the job. I’d wipe and flush and wash my hands and return to the studio, ready to get back down to work.

  79.

  FIRST IT WAS THE cloud shadows drifting across the Joshua Tree hills; they floated along the sides of the mountains like enormous hand puppets, like Ma Nature making funny with silhouette and light. Then it got dark and it was the stars that kept my eyes on the sky. I’d never seen anything on earth so hard or so bright. Thomas handed me the binoculars.

  “Keep an eye over there, Buckskin, near the Big Dipper. I think something’s cooking over that way.” He slowly made his way down the huge boulder we were camped on. When he hit the desert earth the crunch of his carrot seemed like the only sound for miles.

  Even if our intention had been to trip out on some low-grade acid and hunt the sky for flying saucers—because Thomas felt we were getting a little too linear in our musical manoeuvring and needed to “stretch out our cerebral cortexes some and get back off track”—he still had to have his veggies. The doctor he’d seen that morning had counselled him to cool it with the carrots for a while in deference to his slowly oranging flesh, but Thomas knew what was good for him.