The call had come from the police station. We’d spent all day and the early part of the night recording, but everybody in the club was talking about traffic being backed up for miles on the Strip and people overturning cars and the cops cracking skulls and hauling away hippies. Christine had used her one phone call to get a hold of me at the studio, but Paul was with us upstairs finishing off the bottle of scotch and there was no one there to pick up. Emily or Lee ended up calling Colin at Electric to let us know that they and Christine had been busted but not to worry, no one was hurt, and that Christine would be at the Whisky in time for the show. That had been more than an hour ago.
“You tell that to those folks out there,” Slippery said, stamping out his Marlboro. He let the curtain drop.
“Look, traffic is still pretty messed up out on the Strip. She’s probably—”
Probably wondering why some groupie had her hands all over her boyfriend, I thought, standing up and breaking free of Dew’s magic fingers when I saw Christine and Emily and Lee being hurriedly escorted down the hallway by a security guy. Colin had assured me as soon as he’d finished bawling out Thomas that Christine was fine, so I was surprised at how relieved I was when I saw her. And how relieved I was that I was so relieved. I hugged her tight and kissed her head and put my mouth to her ear. “Are you all right?” I said.
“What?” She hadn’t gotten used to the thunder of the audience yet.
“Are you all right?” I yelled.
She covered her ear and pulled away from me. “It’s bad enough I almost got maced today, Bill, don’t make me deaf, too.”
I sat back down on the chair. Christine and the other two began jabbering at Colin and Dew and Slippery at the top of their lungs about what had happened, and after a while I ducked into the dressing room and did another line. When I came back out, nobody had noticed I’d been gone. Christine was still talking, but somehow Colin had gotten her bass around her neck. He gave her a big hug and said he wanted to hear more about it later, but that right now we owed it to that audience out there to give them a great show. “People need music at a time like this,” he said.
Christine’s two partners in crime nodded reflectively.
“Where’s Thomas?” Christine shouted.
From the other end of the hall, “Here he is!” Heather yelled back. “Thomas is right here!”
She led him out of the dressing room by the hand like that scene in the black-and-white Frankenstein movie where the good doctor encourages his creation along in his first clumsy baby steps. Thomas’s face was caked thick with what must have been a triple or even quadruple dose of makeup, his head so thoroughly soaked with what looked to be Slippery’s entire jar of Vaseline that his long hair glistened like a universe of stars under the florescent lights of the hallway. He sleepwalked to a stop directly in front of Colin.
Slowly, barely above the noise of the crowd, “Hey, boss man,” he said. “No time to jaw. Time to give the people what they want.”
He walked up the steps and right out on stage, the explosion of the audience our only cue to follow. Colin threw up his hands and split for his table out front. Lee and Emily gave Christine good-luck hugs and followed Colin’s path, Christine and Slippery right after joining Thomas on stage. I grabbed Heather by the arm.
“He fixed, didn’t he?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head.
“He scored some smack, didn’t he?”
She kept shaking her head, so I shook her arm harder.
“Didn’t he?” I yelled.
She threw her arms around my neck and cried so hard I could feel her entire body convulsing with every sob.
He made her watch him, I thought. That sonofabitch, he made her watch him fix.
“People don’t understand him,” Heather managed. She lifted her head off my shoulder. “We understand him, though. You and I are the only ones.”
I felt a tug on my shirt and let go of Heather and turned around. Dew was holding open the curtain that led to the stairs and then the stage.
“It’s time, Bill,” she said.
I heard Thomas’s voice booming over every speaker in the club, and it was.
83.
ANYONE WHO KNOWS L.A. music history knows what happened. That we made the L.A. Times but Colin wished we hadn’t is all anybody needs to know.
Two songs into our set Thomas began to melt. After ten minutes under the heat of the stage lights, thick globs of white makeup began dripping down his face. When he turned around and locked eyes with me during Slippery’s solo he looked like he was crying wax. I closed my eyes and leaned into the beat.
Thomas decided to sit out the next number. Stand it out, actually, directly behind the stack of speakers to the left of my drum kit. The three of us struggled to fill in for his unannounced missing guitar and vocal parts—Slippery taking two long solos and Christine picking up the words after the surprise of the first silent verse—but I looked up long enough to see Thomas running his hand over his head over and over again and thought he was trying to wipe his hair free of Vaseline. When the tune was over he took centre stage again. Christine, with her microphone up front near his, was the first one in the band to see what was going on. She shot first me, and then Slippery, alarmed glances, but we couldn’t see what she could.
“Hey, L.A.,” Thomas mumbled. His hands were wrapped around the microphone stand as if for support, his lips so tight to the mike it looked like he might swallow it. “Hear we had some, uh, action down on the Strip today.”
The audience exploded. This was more like it. Somebody started what must have been one of the protesters’ cheers—CLOSE DOWN THE STRIP! CLOSE DOWN THE STRIP!—and soon the entire place was yelling in unison. I kept time to the chant with my bass drum. Thomas put a hand in the air. The crowd quieted down.
“That’s great, that’s great. Because some people ... you know, some people are afraid of change. Get stuck in the past. Are afraid of the future.”
A few scattered “That’s right, man”s and “Fuck them”s, then quiet again. Then quieter still when everyone, Slippery and me stuck near the rear of the stage included, got a grip on what was going on.
During Thomas’s moment off stage he’d evidently stuck as many of the pills from the bottle of Valium as he could into his Vaselined hair, each individual capsule sticking out of his scalp like he was harvesting an Rx bumper crop. Once under the heat of the lights again, every few seconds one more Valium would slide down his face before dropping to the ground, greasy hair-gel snail goo trailing right behind.
“But we’re not, uh, we’re not going to let that happen to us. No, sir. Anybody who can’t keep up with us is going to get left behind. Because when a hurt animal can’t keep up with the pack any more, it gets left alone to die. But don’t feel sorry for the dead. If they were supposed to be here, they would be.”
Somebody shouted out “Right on”; someone else “Shut up and play.” A couple nervous coughs throughout the room.
“But Thomas isn’t going to let that happen to us. Thomas knows how to stay alive. Anybody that wants to stay alive, y’all better stick close to Thomas. And everybody else ...” He strummed his guitar. “Everybody else can go off and die right now. Because if the buzzards don’t get you, believe me, motherfuckers, we will.”
He stumbled around, barked, “‘Exit Pursued By Bear,’” then turned to face the audience again.
But “Exit Pursued By Bear” was a new song. A Moody Food song. We hadn’t even finished recording it, let alone ever performed it in public. And how could we even if we’d wanted to? So far, Thomas had overdubbed twelve-string acoustic, electric, and steel-guitar parts, added an accordion effect processed through a clavinette, and for percussion had taped the sound of my high hat and played it backward, giving the track a soft, sucking, swooshing pulse. Christine and Slippery and I just looked at each other. Slippery picked up his silver tone bar.
“Whatever that sawbones told that boy to do, somebody oughta ma
ke sure he does it,” he said.
“One, two, three, four ...”
We tried. We tried to follow him. But he heard what the song was supposed to be, us only what it was. It sounded like the “Louie, Louie” version of a 200-year-old English nursery rhyme as composed by a screamingly mad bishop with a clever way with words. We struggled through to the end, though, all of us ending up in more or less the same place four minutes later, and the song was over. And so was our set, the shortest in the history of the Whisky A Go Go. Colin hopped on stage. Standing in a pool of makeup and pills, he grabbed the mike from the stand.
“Hey, man, let’s take a break and let everybody cool out, all right? The band is obviously still dealing with what went down today, so let’s all take a few minutes to get ourselves together.” He shot the crowd a peace sign before giving the soundman a throat-slashing gesture just in case Thomas had any ideas about making any more speeches or sabotaging our musical reputation any further.
He didn’t have to worry. Thomas let himself be led off stage and into the dressing room by Heather before promptly nodding out with her holding his hand and keeping him vertical in his chair. The attack Colin had planned to launch on Thomas he aimed at Heather instead. The small room was noisy and bursting with the band, Lee and Emily, Dew, and a couple of Electric Records flunkies desperately attempting damage control by busily handing out DUCKHEAD SECRET SOCIETY buttons, but soon Colin’s was the only voice in the room.
“You’re supposed to be his old lady. Didn’t you see what was going on? Didn’t you think it might have been a good idea to let the rest of us know that your boyfriend had decided to single-handedly destroy everything we’ve worked so hard for?”
Heather squeezed Thomas’s limp hand harder and buried her head in his shoulder.
“Hello?” Colin said. “I’m sorry, I’m not done talking about this.”
“Yes, you are,” Christine said. She kneeled down and put an arm around Heather, who was softly crying into Thomas’s shirt. “Leave her alone. Thomas is the one who screwed up, not her.”
“Thomas is the one who screwed up? Just Thomas?” Colin crossed his arms. “Then who was that pickup band I heard him embarrassing himself out there with?”
“You think it was any more fun playing that garbage than listening to it?”
“Well, that’s the right word, anyway.”
“You haven’t heard the studio version we’re working on,” I said.
During the commotion of our arrival I’d snuck off to the john and fired up another couple lines of coke. Enter zealot Bill with a head full of blow and no place to rest his accelerated heart rate.
“I thought you believed in what Thomas was trying to do, man,” I said. “When did you go over to the other side?”
“What other side? Sanity?”
I looked at Thomas, at Heather cocooned around his prostrate body. The slightest grin was painted on his passed-out face.
“What did you sign us up for if you weren’t going to let us grow?” I said. “Is this what makes you so different from Columbia and Warner Brothers and all the rest?”
“Grow? Bill, c’mon. This stuff”—he poked at the pile of tapes on the counter—“is an abortion.”
The first syllable of the first word of a full-throated counterattack was almost out of my mouth when I saw what I thought I saw. In that instant’s flash, I saw it.
Heather was still quietly crying. Christine still had her arm around her shoulder, softly shhhing her to stop. Lee was kneeling down beside Christine. One of the kids with Colin pinned a button to my new cowboy shirt. This much everyone could agree on. Only I saw what happened next.
“What did you just do?” I said. I’d spoken maybe eight words to Lee and Emily combined since we’d first met, but Lee knew I was talking to her.
“What?”
“What the fuck did you just do?”
Lee pointed to herself. “Me?”
Christine slowly stood up. “Bill, what’s wrong?” She knew a cocaine cyclone when she saw one by now.
“Don’t protect her, don’t lie to me.”
“Bill—”
“Fuckingdykebitchfeelingupmyfuckinggirlfriendrightinfrontofmyfuckingfaceyoufuckingdykebitch.”
Unlike me, Christine didn’t need drugs to be enraged. She jabbed a hard finger into my chest. “Do you have any idea how pathetic you look right now?”
“Why? Because I see through your dyke friends?”
Emily and Lee were at the door. “Christine, we’re going,” one of them said.
Colin put a hand on my shoulder. “Bill, c’mon, calm down.”
“Get your hand off me, man.”
“Hey—”
“Who do you think—”
“I was just—”
“Don’t—”
“I’m not going to—”
“Fuck you, you—”
“Fuck you, you—”
Louder and louder and more and more, until undoubtedly some rule of feuding physics took over and the room simply couldn’t contain us all. I felt as if I was vibrating, I was shaking so much. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. When I opened them back up, Thomas and Heather in their little weeping world were the only ones left in the room.
“Have you got a place to stay?”
Dew, standing beside me, with her eyes lowered to the dressing room floor. All along she must have been there beside me.
“Because maybe you should let things cool off for a while. Between you and Christine, I mean.”
Maybe I nodded. Maybe I said yes or yeah or maybe that might be a good idea. Maybe I didn’t say anything.
“Let’s go out the back,” she said, webbing five little fingers through mine. “I live just a couple of blocks away. It’s a nice night. We can walk.”
four
84.
HER LIPS WERE SLIGHTLY chapped and she wasn’t a very good kisser. Too loose, too spongy, like her mouth was just lying there waiting to be worshipped, like kissing was a one-way thing. She wasn’t a very good kisser but neither was I until Christine taught me not to get stuck in long samey rhythms and how to make your lips firm but soft. Now it was my turn to pass on what I knew to Dew.
The details are the same for anyone who’s ever done what they shouldn’t have. Of the making of breaking of promises there is no end. Steaming dandelion tea, Donovan’s Sunshine Superman on the record player, a quilt her grandmother made for her, and, eventually, inevitably, magnetized lips and you can’t fight science, all the songs say so.
The aerobics end of it was fine. The thrill of the unknown other, the delightful difference from what you’re used to in height, weight, and smell; a new place to put your cock. But later—after—both cups of barely touched tea beside the mattress on the floor gone cold, the smoking candles burned nearly all the way down to white waxy stubs, the same five songs on side A over and over and over, Dew gathered up the rumpled bedding and one by one spread them over top of me, from the first cool kiss of the white cotton sheet to the final heavy lump of the quilt. Then naked she climbed in beside naked me and shimmied up against me and put her head on my chest and fell straight asleep. I felt my stomach tighten. I felt like I was going to be sick.
I shut my eyes tight, then opened them back up, stretched my eyelids as hard and wide as I could, like you do when you’re trying to wake yourself up from a bad dream. But when I opened them this time all I saw were fuzzy white stars. And this head—this head I didn’t know—resting on my chest.
My God, I thought, who does this woman think I am?
85.
COLIN THOUGHT IT would be a good idea if we went home for the holidays, like we lived in Santa Cruz or just on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Electric, he said, had everything it needed to put out and publicize the first single (“One O’clock in the Morning” b/w “Dream of Pines”) and it would probably be in everyone’s best interest if we spent Christmas not thinking about music and took some time off, particularly
Thomas. It felt like we were being sent to our rooms two thousand miles away.
Colin had cancelled the remainder of our final Whisky show and that same night’s TV gig, and, aided by a couple more lines of my coke, ricocheted around the room doing Duckhead damage control with as many of the who’s who as possible. The next day, at the sourest photo shoot in the history of rock and roll, there wasn’t any more talk of us sticking around and going on the road with the Byrds. When, later, somebody at Electric sent along a dummy of the album cover to Toronto for our okay, it looked exactly the way it had been: four strung-out people who didn’t want to be where they were.
The idea—Colin’s—had been to shoot us standing around in front of the grimy coffee shop across the street from the studio. Hanging out on one of L.A.’s mean streets with the urban down-and-out, the cover was supposed to say that this wasn’t some Nebraskan cab driver’s idea of country and western music, man, this was white soul music for right now, so open up your eyes and ears. It actually wasn’t a half-bad plan, and it at least showed Colin hadn’t given up on us.
In the shot they ended up using, Christine and I are wearing the clothes we’d had on the night before and are glaring hard into the camera as if it was responsible for making us so miserable. Slippery is standing right beside us, cupping his cigarette from the wind, squinting suspiciously over the towering flame of his lighter at the photographer. Slouching a couple of feet away, Thomas is wearing his sunglasses and Nudie jacket unbuttoned all the way down, oblivious to the December breeze and looking the other way down the street, his silver cross reflecting the rays of the sun. Somehow a white-whiskered old black man clutching a Styrofoam cup of coffee and wearing a stunned expression like he’d just undergone ten continous hours of electroshock therapy made his way into the frame, fuzzy but discernibly forlorn in the distance. He fit right in.
86.
WE SET CHRISTOPHER’S compass north and hit Highway 15 with Thomas at the wheel and a cardboard box full of 7 ½ IPS copies of every Moody Food track we’d worked on sitting on his lap. Every time Thomas flipped on the turn signal his elbow would knock against the box, rattling the stack of tapes inside. Every fifteen minutes or so Heather would ask him if he’d like her to keep the box beside her in the back where there was more room. Every time, Thomas would answer, Thank you, no, and readjust the box. After a couple hundred miles Heather stopped asking.
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