Moody Food (11 page)

BY THE END OF MARCH we were coming close to making Thomas's songs our own. Real close. Part country, part rock, part something it was hard to put your finger on, for lack of any other way of putting it, we simply referred to “Dream of Pines” and “One O'clock in the Morning” and “Lilies by the Side of the Highway” and all the rest of them as Duckhead music. None of us, not even Thomas, knew what the definitively right recipe was yet, but all of us knew that we'd know it when we tasted it. We also knew we were getting close. Real close. I knew because I could almost see it.

Christine and I would trudge home from work and try to grab a couple hours of sleep at my place before heading over to the studio to meet up with Thomas and Heather, Thomas's new girlfriend. While we tuned up, Thomas would go around the room like some kind of degenerate football coach minutes before opening kick off, handing out little white diet pills to help keep us awake and alert. Christine gave them a shot but decided they made her jumpy the next day. I happily reported no such side
effects. It wasn't too long before I realized that the pills worked just as well first thing in the morning.

Gee, instant energy, get-up-and-go in a tablet. Who needs sleep when you're blessed with the miracle of the modern pharmacy? Not this little drummer boy.

IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING else Christine was still doing her folk thing, Tuesday night was still her night at the Riverboat. She played a pretty decent bass by now and was even taking some simple solos on the mandolin, but whether it's boyfriends or girlfriends or musical genres, your first love is always your first.

The Riverboat was small, seating only about a hundred people, so it felt like you were sitting in somebody's living room who happened to know Gordon Lightfoot and Simon and Garfunkel and Joni Mitchell. By this point folk music wasn't the only game in town any more, but it was still Yorkville's heart and soul. Go to the history books if you want the entire who's who, but trust me, the Riverboat was the place to be if one guitar and one voice were what you were looking for.

At the moment, though, I was looking for the hands on the clock on the wall. Because whenever it was showtime at the Riverboat it was dark. Very dark. Which was great for digging whoever was up there on stage, but Christine's set was over at midnight and after that we could split and get started on our usual late-night Tuesday practice. We'd arrived at the club around nine and she'd gone on at nine-thirty and it seemed like she'd been playing now for at least a couple of hours and ... ah, shit. Truth time: I was bored.

We were
all
bored. Not the audience, not the thirty or forty purists who sat there sipping their java and politely applauding
after every capably performed song. But me, Thomas, Heather, we were bored. Hell, even Christine was bored.

We just had to sit there and listen to the same old songs being played the same old way, but Christine was the one who actually had to be up on stage and sing them. I recognized from my seat at the back of the club the identical spaced-out gaze she was prone to these days when, yeah, we were screwing, but I could tell that what she was really thinking was how long practice had run and how late it was and how little sleep she was going to get before going to work the next day.

“How much longer do you think, Buckskin?” Thomas whispered. Folk crowds took their music very seriously, especially at the Riverboat. You kept your hands folded on your lap when the music was playing, you clapped your hands enthusiastically after every song, and if you had something to say to the person sitting next to you that couldn't be said between sets, you said it the same way you were taught to talk in church.
Quietly
.

“CHRISTINE! HOW MUCH LONGER?”

Every bowed head lifted and turned to squint through the darkness in the direction of the back row. Even Thomas looked embarrassed, and that wasn't easy to pull off. Heather, though, hurler of the query, calmly lit her cigarette, crossed her black-stockinged legs, and leaned back in her seat waiting to know how much longer. Because Thomas—her old man, Thomas—he wanted to practise.

Okay. Heather.

Like her boyfriend, it seemed as if she'd dropped in out of nowhere. She was Canadian, though, from northern Ontario, from a tiny place called Geraldton. She was eighteen years old and came to Toronto because she was eighteen years old and from Geraldton. One day no one had ever heard of her or even seen her around Yorkville before, and the next she was at the studio with Thomas and every night after.

Sometimes she'd fool around with a set of Tarot cards at the corner table beside scribbling Scotty while we practised. Or maybe she'd work on a sweater or scarf for Thomas that he never ended up wearing with a pair of blue knitting needles and a big ball of yarn. But mostly Heather adored Thomas.

He'd play his guitar and sing and she'd look up from her cards and gaze at him and smile. He'd walk us through a particularly pesky set of chord changes to one of his new songs for half an hour and the entire tedious time she'd gaze at him and smile. He'd ask her if she'd be a sweetheart and run down to the Grab Bag and get us all Cokes and she'd take his dollar and gaze at him and smile. He'd take a minute to himself and smoke one of her cigarettes out on the balcony and she'd stare out the half-fogged door pane and gaze at him and smile.

“Darlin', darlin', it's all right,” Thomas whispered, hand on her knee. “Miss Christine is just going to finish up here and then we're going to go and practise.”

It was all the explanation Heather needed to hear. “Okay,” she said. And that was that.

But—order restored, all eyes back on the bristly-headed singer up front in the granny dress and combat boots resuming her set by racing through Dylan's “Only a Pawn in Their Game”—Christine, it appeared, wasn't okay with it. What lyrics she didn't mess up or flat-out forget she mumbled. Where she was supposed to sound coolly ironic she sounded like she couldn't be more sincere. And maybe Bob could get away with not being able to hit the right note every time, but Christine sounded like she was strumming and singing two entirely different songs. She finally put the thing out of its misery no more than halfway through with an angry whack of some chords I'm positive Dylan had never even dreamed of.

Christine put a hand over her eyes and peered into the audience. Thomas and I stared down at the floor under our table looking for
somewhere convenient to crawl into. Heather noticed a run in her tights and patiently tried to stop it with some black nail polish retrieved from her bag.

“Bill? Thomas?” Christine said. “Are you guys still here?”

Sliding down in my seat, Why pick on us? I thought. Heather's the one who said it.

“Yeah, hey, there you are. Hey, it looks like you two are falling asleep out there.”

Each of us slowly straightened back up and waved pathetic little half-waves Christine's way. The audience seemed to get a real kick out of this and smiled a nice big folk club smile before returning its attention to Christine.

“What do you guys say we give these folks some Duckhead to take home with them tonight?” she said.

She shielded her eyes with both hands this time and blinked out into the stage light. “Thomas? Bill? Guys?”

There was no way the audience could have been as confused as I was. True, they didn't know what the hell taking home some Duckhead meant—Complimentary wild game delicacy? Just-out opiates gratis for the masses? A hip new sexual position?—but, worse, I actually did. But how and why? And when? Now?
Right
now? We weren't ready. We weren't near enough ready. I wasn't ready. But Thomas was.

Thomas stepped—Stepped? More like leapt—right over me, slapped me on the shoulder, and was halfway up to the stage before turning around and, walking backward, said, “C'mon, Buckskin, let's have some fun.”

Probably seeing how plainly terrified I was, Heather kissed me softly on the cheek and pressed my hand and whispered into my ear not to worry because Thomas wouldn't let anything bad happen to me. Seeing that I still wasn't going anywhere, she gave my hand another encouraging squeeze and turned over one of her Tarot cards.

“See,” she said. “The Ace of Pentacles—I told you nothing bad was going to happen.”

Not quite sharing her unshakable faith in the divine providence of her boyfriend or the destiny-describing powers of the Tarot, the realization that there weren't any drums up there and the fact that every eye in the Riverboat was on me pushed me out of my seat toward the stage. No death-row inmate ever walked a lonelier last walk.

Thomas grabbed me by the arm and yanked me up onto the stage and I took the hint from my rumbling stomach and kept my eyes off the crowd by gluing them to a heating vent in the middle of the ceiling. Then somebody stuck a tambourine in my hand and somebody else handed Thomas an acoustic guitar and then Christine said, “Well?” and Thomas answered, “It's your show, Miss Christine,” and she said, “How about ‘Dream of Pines'?” and when she asked if that was all right with me I heard myself say, “Sure.”

 

Dream of pines

Dream of pines

Never what you find

A home I'll never know.

 

Where to now?

Where to now?

Where and how

A home I'll never go.

 

We murdered them. We murdered the audience, we murdered the waitresses, we murdered the kitchen staff, we even murdered us.

Before the applause was even over, still looking up at the roof duct, “‘That's for a Stranger'?” I shouted out.

“Let's go,” Christine answered.

Thomas counted off.

“One ... Two ... Three ... Four ...”

And then we murdered them all over again.

“HEY, BUCKSKIN, you ever heard of Slippery Bannister?”

“What's a slippery bannister?”

“Not a
what
—a
who
.”

“Okay, who? Who's Slippery Bannister?”

“Slippery Bannister is all that we're missing.”

“All that we're missing from what?”

“From the Duckhead Secret Society.”

I washed down the uppers he'd handed me with a swig from my bottle of Coke.

“Steel guitar?”

“And slide. The man plays a positively wicked slide guitar. Can sing a spell, too.”

“He's good?”

“He's the best.”

I could already feel the little white pills beginning to do their thing.

“What are we waiting for?” I said. “Let's get him up here.”

Raising his own bottle of pop, swallowing some of his own self-prescribed medicine, “Buckskin,” he said, “you read my mind.”

SLIPPERY BANNISTER was the real deal. And that isn't necessarily always such a good thing.

Thomas and I went to meet his 3:25 a.m. bus arriving from
Detroit and were standing around the nearly deserted Greyhound terminal drinking bad slot-machine coffee to keep us warm even though it was already early April. We'd finished up practising a couple of hours before and had walked Christine and then Heather home before hiking over to Bay Street and the depot.

“I thought you said this guy”—I wasn't quite ready to call anybody Slippery yet—“was from the South,” I said.

“Blytheville, Arkansas,” Thomas answered. “Right in the heart of Dixie.”

“So what's he doing in Detroit?”

“I believe Slippery said something about Thunderbirds.”

“If this guy is as good as you say he is, what's he doing working an assembly line?”

Thomas forced down a long drink from his paper cup of coffee.

“Slippery Bannister is an aesthetic rebel, Buckskin. Much like ourselves, he believes that the guts have been ripped out of contemporary country by those soulless piss-ants down on Music Row. And in spite of repeated lucrative offers from the Nashville establishment, he refuses—he absolutely refuses—to compromise his artistic principles just to make a few quick bucks whoring around as a session man. And frankly, he couldn't have been more excited when I explained to him what we're trying to accomplish up here and how we envision his considerable musical talents meshing with our own. He said it sounded like we're just the kind of fresh breeze everybody's been waiting for down there. Dying for, in fact.”

“You got all this from him in one phone call?”

“Not in so many words, no, but—Hey, that must be Slippery.”

A bus pulled into the station, but it was from Montreal, not Motor City. We sipped our coffee in silence and watched a string of stunned-looking travellers stumble down the steps of the bus and onto the platform.

When the last passenger was off, the driver started hauling bags out from the berth underneath the bus and everyone began to wake up to where they were and the fact that their luggage was being tossed into one great big growing pile of black and brown and tan. The only other person inside the station, a plain-looking young woman with her hair hidden underneath a blue kerchief standing a few feet down from us with a sleeping baby in her arms, rapped at the glass a few excited times to attract someone's attention. She didn't get it, so she knocked again, harder, and this time the entire crowd turned around to see who was the lucky person being welcomed to town.

Only one of them was, though, a guy about our age but with short hair and wearing a crisp checked sports jacket in spite of his seven-hour trip, and everyone else lowered their eyes and returned to the job of separating their stuff from everyone else's.

“One of you boys Graham?”

Thomas and I turned around. And there he was, Slippery Bannister, aesthetic rebel, in the flesh. Neither of us had noticed the simultaneous arrival of his bus at the other end of the platform.

He looked like a middle-aged 1930s dust-bowl sharecropper who'd come into town to argue with the bank manager about his delinquent mortgage, the moth-nibbled brown suit and tie hanging off his skeletal frame testament to the years of futile struggle to keep the failing farm in the family. The only thing that indicated that he really had cut out for the city years before was the pound or so of gleaming Vaseline he used to slick back his thinning black hair. He shook a cigarette free right from his pack to his lips and lit it with a silver lighter that shot up a flame a good six inches, expertly avoiding setting his eyebrows on fire. He took a long drag and immediately filled up the entire terminal with the stink of what a Canadian nose knows can only be one thing, American cigarettes. I noticed that his hand shook slightly as he
lit his Marlboro. The smell of whisky competed with the stench from his smoke.

“Mr. Bannister, sir,” Thomas said, going right for the old man's free hand and shaking it vigorously, “Thomas Graham. Welcome to Toronto, Canada. I'd like to introduce you to Bill Hansen, our drummer. Buckskin, Mr. Slippery Bannister. Everybody up here calls Bill ‘Buckskin.'”

If Thomas ever decided to let go of his hand, I was prepared to shake it—although whether to address him as Mr. Bannister or simply Slippery I hadn't decided yet—but I didn't have to worry. He let go of Thomas's grip and dismissed me with a quick nod.

“There's a matter of bus money,” he said. He looked at Thomas. He looked at me. I looked at Thomas. Thomas looked back at him and nodded his head several times in rapid agreement.

“Of course, of course,” Thomas said. “Your transportation costs, just as we'd discussed. But you've got to be tired after your trip. Let's go and get you bedded down first and—”

“Nobody's going anywhere until I get my money.” The old man crushed his fresh cigarette dead underneath the sharp tip of his pointy black cowboy boot and folded his arms across his chest. I was almost ready to start counting the change in my jeans when Thomas laughed and pulled out his wallet.

Turning to me, “You see, where Mr. Bannister and I come from, Buckskin, you know a man by his word.” He handed over the money. “There you are, sir.”

There were only four bills, but the old man took his time, slowly moving his lips as he counted each one. “This here's too much,” he said. “I can't make no change for you right now.”

Thomas laughed again and patted him on the shoulder. Turning to me, “I think we can trust Mr. Bannister, don't you, Buckskin?”

I laughed an imbecile's laugh right along with Thomas and he picked up the old man's bag and we were off for a short cab ride over to Heather's place, which Thomas had decided the final piece of the puzzle that was the Duckhead Secret Society was going to call home for the next little while. Thomas and I stepped into the dark street to see if a taxi was coming. Back on the curb, fresh Marlboro ignited and assaulting the fresh night air, “Two things,” the old man said.

“First off, this here's a round-trip ticket I got in my pocket. I don't like what I see up here, I'm gone, you understand? Gone. And with that $100 bonus we already discussed. In cash. In full.”

“Absolutely,” Thomas said, “we're in complete understanding. But really, I really think you're going to—”

“Second off,” he said, smoke pouring out of both nostrils, “either of you boys know where a man can get some
barbecue
in this town?”