“Of course not,” I said. “You just can’t believe how incredibly hard he’s been working on our new songs.”
“Or how he won’t talk on the phone.”
“Right.”
“Because he’s afraid he might catch cancer.”
“Um ...”
“I want those tapes this week.”
“Okay.”
“This week, Bill. I haven’t got time for this. This week or I’m coming out there and getting them myself. And taking the plane fare out of the rest of the group’s advance.”
I hung up the phone and looked out the window at what were now snowflakes the size of quarters slowly falling straight down. Gordon Lightfoot was playing at the Riverboat and I knew Christine would be there, had overheard her excitedly telling Heather that day at the studio. Since we’d returned to town she’d kept her promise to help see through Moody Food, but was also full speed ahead leading her own life once again: working part-time at Sam’s, attending meetings that the Diggers were holding about what to do about Yorkville, and even picking up her acoustic guitar again and doing the occasional solo spot. I hadn’t known about the latter until I saw a handmade poster in familiar handwriting advertising her and a bunch of others performing at the Bohemian Embassy. I stood there in the frozen street looking at the flapping sign, hurt that I hadn’t been told, guilty that I felt relieved I wouldn’t have to try to talk myself out of going so I wouldn’t miss a writing session with Thomas.
But tonight was going to be different. Tonight the plan was to calm down with a few Mandraxes and show up at the Lightfoot gig coke-free and cucumber cool and surprise Christine by sitting down beside her holding nothing stronger than a couple cups of coffee and with an ear sincerely tuned in to something other than Moody Food for a change. And maybe, finally, actually, really talk. About her. About me. About us.
A key clicked in the door and I felt the muscles in my butt and lower back instinctively tighten, although I knew it had to be Thomas coming back from dropping Heather off at her place and scoring. Nighttime at the Park Plaza was boy’s night every night. I tried not to imagine Heather sitting down at her tiny kitchen table for a long night’s worth of knitting Thomas another pair of mittens.
“Enjoying the view?” he said, dropping his leather coat to the floor.
The guy who’d designed the hotel would have had a hard time connecting the original room with this one. Several room-service plates full of slowly moulding steamed vegetables along with a couple of silver coffee urns and anything you could imagine being used as an ashtray—half-finished Coke bottles, the soap dish from the bathroom, even an old cowboy boot—surrounded Thomas’s king-sized bed like a junkyard fort. Several guitars and the portable tape recorder were all within horizontal grasp so that whenever inspiration visited he wouldn’t have to get up.
“Colin called again,” I said.
Thomas went straight for the bed. When we weren’t at the studio, that’s where he usually was. He grabbed the rectangular piece of wood he kept beside the bed and laid it across his knees, stuck his hand down the front of his jeans and pulled out a baggy of coke.
“I think he means it this time,” I said. “He said that unless you send him the tapes tomorrow he’s going to come up here and get them himself.”
I didn’t know why Thomas refused to hand over Dream of Pines any more than Colin did. Thomas’s official version was that he wanted Moody Food in the bag before the first album came out so we could follow it right up with a wicked one-two punch, but I didn’t buy it. I just wished I didn’t have to lie to Colin on the telephone every other day.
“He cannot have what he cannot find,” Thomas said, cutting out four fat lines on the board. He leaned over and snorted two and laid the slat beside him on the bed and picked up his acoustic.
“He’s serious, man,” I said, staring at the coke.
“So am I.”
I forced myself to look away from the two remaining white lines; watched Thomas’s fingers dance all around his twelve-string; instead of telling him I was taking the night off to meet Christine, got lost in the churning sound of the guitar.
Today in the studio it seemed like we’d never get the rhythm to “Sabers Up!” right. Tonight, robin’s egg blue with just the faintest glaze of an early May rain shower—perfect. I stopped thinking and just listened until he stopped playing. Thomas drew the now-empty board back onto his lap.
“Okay,” he said, “just one more each. These new chords work, but the last line in every verse has got too many syllables now.”
“Right,” I said, rubbing my nose, bowing my head again. Just one more.
93.
ALL WINTER LONG you wait for it, know it’s coming, never really believing that it will.
Sticking your head out the door every morning from the first week of March on—nothing. Just one more scarf and gloves and plenty of Chapstick day. Shut the door tight, pull on an extra pair of socks, and resign yourself to a lifetime of wet feet and cough drops.
Then it’s here, it’s really here, only when you’ve given up on it does it finally arrive, everywhere you look fellow spring-stoned zombies with their unzipped jackets flapping wide open in the warm afternoon breeze, sun-kissed perma-smiles on every stranger’s happily stunned face.
And so what if the first day of spring makes a promise it can never keep?
94.
“DON’T TELL ME you’re quitting on me too, Buckskin.”
“Nobody’s quitting on anybody, I’m just not sure what you want me to do.”
“Don’t tell me you’re quitting on me too.”
“Did you hear me? I’m not—”
“Don’t tell me that, I don’t want to hear that.”
“Listen, if you want me to play the piano, fine, I’ll play the piano. It’s just—”
“Just what?”
“Well, I don’t know how to play the piano. And you do. So ...”
“Buckskin, we wrote ‘Dance’s Boat’ together, remember? We know what this song is all about. The lone child in the empty sun-streaked room. The wooden building blocks lying all around him on the hardwood floor. The hours and hours he’ll never not know again. Remember? Remember?”
“I remember.”
“Good. Now, how can someone who knows how to play the piano play the keyboard part on a song like that?”
“They can’t.”
“No, they can’t.”
“No.”
“So, here, put your fingers here. I’ll get you started. After that, you just do whatever feels right.”
95.
THOMAS TOLD ME to tell Colin he put Dream of Pines in the post, but Dream of Pines wasn’t what he sent.
What Thomas mailed instead were the handful of Moody Food tracks he’d dubbed done and, as a special bonus—because the more I put Colin off about delivering the album, the more he started asking me to ask Thomas to consider recording a rocking Duckhead version of a classic country song to issue as another single after the album did come out—a very creepy deconstruction of the Kitty Wells song “It Wasn’t God That Made Honky Tonk Angels” sung by Slippery in his foggy-throated most baritone. If it wasn’t enough that Slippery was taking the lead on a tune made famous by a woman named Kitty that was about how girls weren’t to blame for going bad because a two-timing man was probably lurking somewhere in the background, Thomas had us play it so slowly that I literally needed to leave the recording studio and go home and get my bottle of Mandraxes so I could hit the drums sluggishly enough. It came out sounding like the world’s first and last country and western raga. Of course, I dug it. After four Mandys, I kept listening to it on the playback and seeing Neapolitan ice-cream swirls.
Colin didn’t see anything. Except maybe proverbial pissed-off red when he opened up the package and hooked up the tapes and heard what we’d delivered. After seven messages from the front desk I snorted up the courage to return his call. I should have kept the stash beside me.
“Ple
ase tell me you’re putting me on. Please tell me he’s still mad at me. And please, please tell me the real album is going to be here tomorrow.”
“You didn’t like any of it?” I said.
“Bill ... c’mon.”
“Not even ‘Till My Wet Fur Froze’? Thomas thought it was topical and might get some airplay. That crowd noise you hear in the song is actually taken from the riot on the Strip. Maybe the publicity people could let that get around and—”
“Bill.”
All right, so Thomas never said he thought it would get any airplay. Thomas never thought anything about a song other than whether or not it worked. And this one did, it did work. Was scary as hell then and still scares me now, long after that particular riot is over but a million more are just getting started.
“Are you going to come and get them, then?” I said.
I’d been hoping Colin would hop on a plane and come north almost right from the start, just take the damn tapes back and print up a few thousand copies of the album and that would be that. For one thing, whatever Thomas’s reluctance at having our old songs see the light of day was, I was proud of them and it didn’t feel right that they were gathering dust in a cardboard box on the floor of his hotel room closet. It was like an undiscovered Van Gogh rotting away in somebody’s basement, like the thing didn’t exist if people couldn’t look at it. Plus, when I’d gone back to Etobicoke for Christmas the only way I could make my mother and father believe that I shouldn’t be immediately hospitalized for exhaustion and maybe worse was that I really had been working overtime on an actual record album that they’d be holding in their worried hands sometime soon. That was four months ago.
“You know I can’t, things are crazy right now with the festival.”
“But it’s two whole months away.”
“Two whole months away just means there’s that much more time for something to go wrong. Like everybody’s agreed to play for free and now Ravi Shankar comes along and wants $3500 for some school he runs in India.”
“Wow, what are you going to do?”
“Pay him, I guess.”
I really was wowed. The Monterey Pop Festival was going to be the first hippie nation under the sun, three days in June of what turned out to be more than 300,000 freaks grooving on, among others, the Byrds, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, and even a couple of lesser-known bands under contract to Electric Records. But not the Duckhead Secret Society. Colin was on the festival’s board of governors, but nepotism had its limits. Bands with one unknown single to their credit weren’t allowed to play with the big boys and girls.
“So I guess I’ll talk to Thomas again,” I said. There was silence at the other end of the line for a couple of seconds, long enough that I said, “Colin?”
“You know I loved the music Thomas was making right from the start,” he said. “That all of you were making. You know that, right?”
“Look, I’ll talk to—”
“I mean, I wasn’t stupid, I knew Thomas Graham wasn’t going to be the next Jim Morrison, the next Tiger Beat pin-up boy. But the music was special enough and so was he that I thought there was a place for both of them, you know? That we’d make a place for both of them.”
I didn’t like the way the conversation was drifting into the past tense. “Hey, Thomas isn’t dead,” I said. “And neither is this band. Let me read him the riot act. He’s due back here any minute and this time I’ll make sure he gets the message loud and clear. This time I’ll really talk to him. Really. You’ll get the album. I promise.”
There was another long silence.
“I thought getting him out of L.A. would be enough,” Colin said. “I thought he’d straighten himself out on his own up there. I mean, if I wasn’t so busy and we were bigger and had the resources I’d come up there myself and ... Sometimes I think somebody should burn this fucking city to the ground. And not just the Sunset Strip.”
I switched the phone to my other ear.
“The tapes go in the mail tomorrow,” I said. “I give you my word.”
I let the phone line hum.
“Sure. You send me the tapes whenever you can. We’ll put them out then.”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Not whenever—tomorrow.”
“Sure.”
I could hear someone calling him, something about another call on another line.
“I’ve got to go,” he said. “Say hey to Christine and Slippery and Heather.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I heard the same voice as before calling Colin’s name.
“Bill?”
“Yeah?”
“Be careful.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, man. Just be careful.”
96.
I WAS ON MY KNEES in the closet when Thomas got back. The cardboard box was still there, but there wasn’t anything in it. I kept feeling around anyway with both blind hands.
“My good suit’s at the cleaner, Buckskin. Anything else I can get for you?”
I sat up on my knees, head still in the closet.
“People should hear that music,” I said.
“We’re going to give them something better.”
“You know I believe that.”
“Good.”
He put his room key on the desk.
“Why can’t they have both?” I said.
When he pulled a plastic baggy from his pants and then got the cigar box from underneath the bed and clicked on the bathroom light I knew we wouldn’t be working tonight.
Just before he shut the bathroom door, “Didn’t anyone ever tell you you can’t serve two masters?” he said.
97.
“SO, BOTTOM LINE here, what you’re saying is that we ain’t getting paid.”
“Well, no, not right away,” I said. “But we will. As soon as the record comes out.”
“Which you don’t know when because nobody knows where the tapes is gone.”
“We know where they are, Thomas has them.”
“Yeah, and he ain’t telling nobody where he put them.”
“For now. For now he’s not telling.”
“Uh huh.”
Slippery moved around the smoking skillet of pork chops on the hot-plate burner on the floor and stood up. We were in the hallway outside his room.
“Pardon me,” he said, opening his door just wide enough to let him slide in sideways, then shutting it closed right after.
It was only a little after eight, but Thomas was passed out at the hotel and it was too nice an April night to be stuck inside nannying him. Besides, I’d rung up Heather and she’d been thrilled at the offer to come over and watch him sleep. Setting Slippery straight about what was going on with our final Electric Records payment wasn’t my idea of celebrating the coming of spring, but at least it got me out of the room. I’d gone by Christine’s place first, but there hadn’t been anyone home.
Slippery came back out with a bottle of Tabasco sauce and a chipped white plate with a six-inch crack in it that looked like a long black hair and pulled the door tight. In all the months he’d lived downstairs from the studio I don’t think I ever saw his door open longer than it took for him to duck in or out.
He kneeled down and uncapped the little red bottle and drenched the meat. “So I guess that’s it, then,” he said.
“Your food’s done?”
He almost smiled. “That too.” He forked over each fat slice of sizzling pork and bathed the other side.
“I suppose if this here record ever does come out you wouldn’t mind mailing me my share,” he said.
“It’s not going to be that long. Thomas is going to come around to the realization that that music belongs to everybody sooner or later. By the time we finish Moody Food at the latest.”
He turned off the burner and stacked the pork chops on the plate.
“You wait here,” he said. “Let me put these inside and I’ll get you my brother’s address.”
; “Go ahead and eat,” I said. “Just give it to me tomorrow at the studio.”
He stood up with the plate in his hand; stood there in front of me with his eyes on the floor.
“You tell Graham and his woman and yours too it’s been good working with them, all right? Tell them for a bunch of hippies we made some pretty good music there for a while.”
“Why don’t you tell them yourself?”
He lifted his eyes, but only as high as the meat on the plate. “Because as soon as I get my affairs straightened away I guess I’ll be on a Greyhound south.”
“We’re recording tomorrow. Where are you going?”
He finally looked up.
“You think it would be a good idea do you if I stayed cooped up in that broom closet there just so I can piss away the rest of my God-given days listening to Graham and your woman scrapping over whether the fiftieth take of the middle section of the second verse of some song nobody is ever gonna hear anyway is good enough? That and watch you and him come back from the bathroom bouncing around the studio like a couple of long-tailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs? You think that’s about the best I can do with the rest of my natural life?”
“What do you mean songs no one will ever hear?” It was probably the only thing he’d said that didn’t matter right now, which was probably why I latched onto it.
“Wake up, Hoss, you hitched your wagon to a sick mule. That boy can write, I’ll give you that, but he’s gone wrong in the head, anybody can see that. Hell, even when Hank took to the bottle full-time and they booted him off the Opry he was still writin’ good songs.”
“So how come you hung around this long, then?” I said. “Just to see how wrong in the head Thomas was going to get?”
“Why do you think? The same reason I come up here in the first place. I was counting on the second part of that record company money to put me over what I need, but I’m close enough. I been talking to my brother back home. He’s been dickering with the fellow that owns the place I’m after and all I got to do is let him know when any time now.”
Moody Food Page 31