Now it was my turn to stare at the floor. “What am I going to tell Thomas?”
“Do him a favour and tell him you’re all done, too. You and your woman.”
Looking up, “How’s that going to help Moody Food get finished?” I said.
Slippery rubbed his brow. “Christ, boy, do both yourselves a favour.”
98.
HEROIN IS BAD. Once in a while the grownups are right.
I don’t know if our last show in L.A. was the first time Thomas slid a spike into his arm, but I doubt it. Thomas knew more about drugs than most doctors will in a lifetime, and not because he was studying for his pharmacology degree on the sly. But from the day I met him until that night at the Whisky, only what made each moment more, not less. Uppers mostly, with the odd hallucinogenic added in when things got too ordinary and not odd enough. Stimulants of one kind or another, anyway, stuff to give life a little boost when it wasn’t keeping up its end of the bargain.
Heroin doesn’t do that. Heroin blocks out the sun. Heroin closes the windows and nails shut the shutters and unplugs the phone and doesn’t answer the door.
When Thomas would show up at the Park Plaza and go for the cigar box before even taking off his coat, I knew that the white powder in the clear plastic bag in his hand wasn’t coke. But I also knew that once he came out of the bathroom he’d be zonked out in no time and getting the R&R that staying up for two nights straight working on Moody Food demanded.
I guess now I sound like one of those women you hear about who lets her husband go on thinking she doesn’t know about his mistress because he’s happier around the house and more efficient at work. But try to understand that back then all I really knew was that the sonofabitch was finally getting some rest for a change and was always ready to go back to work the next day hungrier than the one before.
Try to understand that.
99.
THE DOWNSIDE WAS that Christine was as close to tears as she ever got. The nice part was that she’d phoned me to talk about why.
“Slow down,” I said, “take your time.” Thomas was passed out, curled up on the bed in the fetal position hugging his twelve-string. Heather sat on the desk chair pulled up beside the bed, contentedly knitting away.
“It’s not the stuff,” she said. “And except for what I was going to give to the people who run the Trailer, I don’t even really care about the money.” The Trailer was a way station set up on Avenue Road to help deal with the influx of new villagers struggling to cope with everything from VD to acid flashbacks. And now that Christine’s house had been ransacked, it was one potential contribution poorer.
“I came by tonight around eight and couldn’t believe there wasn’t anybody home,” I said. “There’s usually always somebody hanging around there.”
“We were all at the meeting.”
“But the front door was unlocked.”
“You know we never lock our doors.”
“I guess it’s time you started.”
“If that’s your way of trying to help ...”
“No, no,” I said, “all I meant was—”
“Forget it, just forget I called.”
“Chris, calm down. You’re worked up. Let me come over and we’ll talk.”
There was silence but no dial tone, so I held on.
“I don’t feel like being here right now,” she said. “It’s creepy.”
“So let’s meet somewhere else.”
“Aren’t you under house arrest as usual?”
“C’mon.”
“Why don’t I come over there, then,” she said.
“Here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the Park Plaza doesn’t sound so bad right now. I don’t suppose you have too many problems with break and enters there, anyway.”
I was sitting on the edge of the desk and looked over at Thomas and Heather, him drooling onto the bedspread, her hooking and pearling.
“Meet me at my place in twenty minutes,” I said. “Thomas and Heather are here and they’re kind of talking some stuff out.”
“I didn’t think you’d kept your place.”
“Where did you think I slept?”
“I wasn’t sure you did.”
“Be serious,” I said.
“I am.”
100.
UNHAPPINESS IS wonderful for breaking down language barriers. That’s a tune everybody knows. Although sometimes you need a partner in song to help draw out how far gone you actually are.
“When I think of them having my mother’s ring it feels like I was there and they’d done something to me.”
We were sitting with our knees pulled up to our chins across from each other on the bed, mostly because it was the only place to sit. I nodded and told Christine about how all the really with-it guys in grade four had one of those nifty Crown Royal purple flannel bags with the flaming yellow drawstrings to put their marbles in and how my father was a second-generation Scottish-Canadian scotch man who would have rather eaten raw peat than drink anything else. About how week after week, one after-dinner drink per night at a time, I’d watch the level fall on the bottle of Dewars he kept beside the bar fridge downstairs and bug him to please, please get that stinky stuff he drinks in the cool purple bag next time and not in the dumb cardboard box. About how he didn’t and didn’t until one day he did, calling me into the living room after dinner with a glass of whisky in one hand and my very own Crown Royal bag hanging from the other, making a face as he sipped his drink and tousling my hair and telling me to go get my marbles and let him see what all the bloody fuss was about. About how in the maelstrom of a ten-year-old’s mind marbles were now ancient history and Topps hockey cards were now what made life worth living. How I dug out my old marbles anyway and could have won an Academy Award in the Best Appreciative Son category and how it was the first time in my life I ever did anything for anyone else besides me. How somebody stole the bag from me at the one and only house party I ever threw during high school when my parents were away for a week in Florida because of the nine bucks and change I had in it from sidewalk snow shovelling and how I unsuccessfully tried to track the bastard that did the deed down because it was more than a purple flannel bag with a flaming yellow drawstring but was, I don’t know, important, you know?
“I know,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Especially after this.”
“Yeah, I guess ...”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
I’d raced right over to my old place on Huron as soon as I’d gotten off the phone to bleed the radiators and light some candles and generally try to make it feel like I didn’t just pay the rent there. I’d also fired up a couple of lines just before Christine arrived, which I knew were making me talk too much considering the idea was for me to listen to her but ... Yeah. Yeah for hours and hours.
“I’m tired, Chris.” I didn’t know I wasn’t just talking about tonight until I said it. I dabbed my nose with a bunch of balled tissues. It was only my second nosebleed since I’d checked in at the emergency ward, and neither had been as bad as the first one so I’d never bothered going back.
“You could have fooled me,” she said, smiling.
“Really?”
Head down, “No.”
Without thinking what I was doing, I slid my stockinged feet underneath hers. When she didn’t move them away, I felt like there wasn’t enough cocaine in the world to keep me awake for one more minute and how I wanted to peel back Christine’s skin and snuggle down deep inside and not come out until I never wanted anything more complicated than a swell purple bag to put my marbles in.
“Stay the night,” I said.
“There’s not much of it left.”
We both looked out my window; couldn’t see it, but could smell dawn waking up and getting ready to step on stage.
“For what’s left of it, then.”
She looked down at her feet and mine together.
“I’
m not sure that’s such a good idea,” she said.
“We don’t have to do anything. I mean, we can just—”
She put her finger to my lips. “It’s okay. I know what you meant. And I’m not saying it might not be nice. Even if we did do something.”
“But what, then?”
“I just think we’re in very different places right now and to mix those places up might make things more confusing than they already are.”
“What are you confused about?”
“C’mon, Bill.”
Now it was my turn to look at our feet.
Head up, “Well, maybe we could be confused together,” I said.
She gave a little laugh and brushed some hair out of my face. When she looked into my eyes and kept on looking I thought she was going to kiss me.
“When we came back from the meeting tonight and found out what had happened, I was mad at you,” she said.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you.”
“Look, I know I said some things in L.A. I shouldn’t have and—”
Christine shook her head, waved her hand.
“Haven’t you noticed what’s happened to the village?” she said. “You never heard of people getting their houses busted into before. And you never saw hard drugs on the street before either.”
“So what’s any of that got to do with me?”
She put a hand on her hip and shot me a come-off-it smirk.
“Okay, so what’s your leaving your front door unlocked and getting robbed got to do with me?”
She pulled her feet from over top of mine.
“Can’t you see that you and Thomas are helping keep the whole heavy drug scene in business?” she said. “You’re part of the infrastructure that makes that element possible.”
“Oh, come off it. Nobody makes anybody rip somebody else off. Least of all me and Thomas. We’re too busy, believe me.”
“Try to understand, Bill. If it wasn’t for people like you, there wouldn’t be people like them. Whatever you do has consequences that affect more than just you. Whether you can see those consequences right now or not.”
I swung over the side of the bed and pulled on my cowboy boots, not really sure why but doing it like I was anyway.
“People like me? What does that mean? Since when was your boyfriend people like me. And please spare me this week’s anarchist sermon from the mount about my personal role in the collapse of society.”
She reached over and grabbed her combat boots off the floor and suddenly it was a race who could be shod first.
“You know,” she said, “speaking to you on the phone and sitting here tonight, I started to ask myself why we never talk any more like we used to. Thanks for reminding me.”
“Meaning what?”
I beat her by half a boot, but then I’d had a head start and didn’t have any laces to do up.
“Meaning what?”
I followed five feet behind her the entire way to her house, asking the same question over and over. She never did answer. After slamming her front door in my face I heard the lock on the other side go click.
“About time!” I yelled.
On the way back to the Park Plaza I found an alleyway, squatted down in the dark behind a dumpster, and snorted one line and then one more off my forearm. When I hit the street again there was a bundle of bound Toronto Telegrams in front of a drugstore. I looked around and tore one out from the pile, stared at the date at the top of the front page.
How could it be tomorrow, I thought, when today’s not even over yet?
101.
THOMAS WOKE UP from his most recent holiday out on the mainline, found out what was up with Slippery splitting town, and within twenty-four hours the old man had been bushwhacked in his sleep and all his money was gone and he was back on the bottle and feeding from Thomas’s benevolent hand all over again with a black patch over his right eye covering up a scratched retina. His hands were fine, though; he could still work and record. They’d never touched his hands.
I put two and two together and told myself it was five. Told myself that Thomas was the motherfucker of all motherfuckers and told myself that two and two was five.
102.
“CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?”
“C’mon, Thomas, let me out.”
“Did you hear that? Did you just hear that?”
“Unlock the door, man.”
“I’m asking you, Buckskin, can you believe this?”
“Unlock the fucking door, man.”
He hadn’t moved from his cross-legged vigil in front of the record player’s speakers since he’d plunked himself down there five hours before, when he’d blown through the hotel room door with the cellophane wrapper already torn off a brand new copy of the Beatles’ latest, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He’d only gone out to score more coke, but had stopped off at the Grab Bag to get some smokes on the way back and somebody had been playing “Good Morning Good Morning,” the album’s second-to-last track. Bad move. When he heard those cats and dogs and chickens whooping it up in the background, he stormed around the corner to Record World to get his very own copy. The cow sounds on his own “Struggling for Purchase” were supposed to be rock and roll’s first recorded livestock.
“What’s wrong, Buckskin? If you’ve got to check in with anybody, why don’t you use the phone in the room?”
The curtains were closed as usual, but it felt more like midafternoon than early evening. Because a single, final guitar overdub might be debuted, debated, and ultimately discarded over the course of two or three days’ work at the hotel, we rarely left the room now, were only going into the studio about once a week. Thomas went to our dealer’s three times that. Christine didn’t care. That she only had to put up with Thomas for a couple of hours a week was good enough for her. Slippery was once again drunk most of the time, was beyond the point of caring.
“Who said I need to use the phone?” I answered. “It’s just that I’ve heard this album six times in a row and I want to get some fresh air. Christ.”
He stood up and picked up the receiver. “C’mon, use this phone. It’ll save you a dime.”
I shook the door handle. “Open the door, man.”
He’d locked the deadbolt and pocketed the key when I’d said I was going out for a while after the fifth time the final crushing piano note to “A Day in the Life” signalled the end of the album. Was I overwhelmed by the potpourri of hard and soft rock, blues, psychedelia, show tunes, and even classical? No question. Was I coked-up enough myself to obsess over it in a hermetically sealed hotel room during the first brilliant week of May? You bet. But there’s crazy and then there’s crazy. And this was crazy.
“I wonder how they knew, hey, Buckskin.”
I dropped my head and closed my eyes. It was obvious there was only one way out of the room, and that was by taking the same road Thomas was travelling. I buckled my seat belt and took a deep breath.
As calmly as I could, “Who are they, and you wonder how they know what?”
“Concentrate for a minute. I think if you do the answer might come to you.”
I took another breath.
“Are you talking about the Beatles?” I said.
“Hey, very good.”
I tried to think, but all I wanted to do was get outside on the street in the summer sun and start running until either I got somewhere or my heart exploded trying.
“Look, man,” I said, “I really don’t know what you’re—”
He ripped the disk off the turntable and hurled it against the wall. It didn’t break, though. Just sort of sailed into it edgewise like a thin black Frisbee and fell straight to the ground.
“Somehow somebody who knows what Moody Food is all about talked to somebody they shouldn’t have talked to about something they shouldn’t have talked about and that means you or me and I know it wasn’t Thomas so who do you think that leaves, Buckskin, who do you think that leaves?”
“You think
I called up John, Paul, George, and Ringo and told them we were putting crowd noise and animal sounds on our record and were layering on lots of different kinds of instruments and weren’t using pauses between some of our songs. You think I discussed these things with the Beatles.”
He was going to yell something else but noticed the album cover sitting on top of one of the speakers. He picked it up. Stood there staring at the catalogue of famous wax figurines on the front for a long time; eventually sat down on the floor and kept on staring. Buried there somewhere amid Karl Marx and Mae West and Dylan Thomas and all the others, I think he was looking for himself.
103.
WHEN THE LAST peace sign was flashed and the final joint passed, by the end of the day, May 22, nearly five thousand people, Christine among them, gathered in Queen’s Park to listen to Buffy Sainte-Marie, Leonard Cohen, and several lesser-knowns officially inaugurate the Toronto Love-In and the Summer of ’67 with an entire afternoon of music, open-air pot-smoking, barefoot dancing, and general out-and-out freak-power fun. The Summer of Love came too late for Thomas and me.
I’d left him hunched over his Gibson and gone out for a bottle of Coke. As soon as I stepped foot onto the street I felt the throb of the crowd in the nearby park pounding in my ears. I ended up making it half a block down Bloor before turning around and retreating to the hotel without the pop. It sounded like an army was coming. I hurried back upstairs to our room.
104.
THE NEW RULE was one at a time. There’d be Thomas and Heather and you in the recording studio putting down your part, and that would be it. RCA had pretty strict rules about always having an employee in the booth, but Thomas must have laid some cash on somebody because every time it was my turn to record a percussion part Thomas and Heather were the only ones there. Thomas never explained why, but I knew it was an attempt to keep Ringo and everyone else on the outside from stealing the secret recipe to Moody Food.
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