Moody Food (23 page)

“YOU CAN'T JUST HAVE PIE, BILL,” Christine said.

The young waitress kept snapping her gum in tight little pops and pressing her pen to her notepad, but couldn't stop staring at the stubble on the back of Christine's head. After some kind fellows in yellow hard hats enjoying a few cold beverages at a truck stop in Ohio a couple weeks back offered to show us what they “did to muff-divers around here” and help Christine understand what it felt to be made love to by a real man, she'd reluctantly agreed to join Thomas and me in donning a baseball cap whenever we decided to break bread in public, he and I tucking our shoulder-length hair up and under.

Christine ran her finger down the grease-smudged paper menu.

“He'll have the grilled cheese,” she said. “On brown. And instead of french fries, make it a side salad, plain. Thanks.” She picked up her paperback. To Heather, sitting across the table, “What some of these places pass off as salad dressing is worse for you than red meat.”

Heather smiled and proceeded to order up the goriest item on the menu, the Fatburger Deluxe, a quarter-pound of charred
ground beef saddled with a fried egg, one slice of processed cheese, and three thick strips of fat-bubbling bacon, all the major slaughterhouse food groups in one. Every day she ate the same thing: the biggest hamburger she could get her hands on, french fries, and a vanilla milkshake. Slippery, who always found a way to get to a grocery store and cook up something sufficiently greasy on the hot plate he'd brought with him, was snoozing out in the hearse.

The waitress managed to scribble down Christine's order and continue to blow bubbles without breaking her stare. Christine attempted to disappear behind
The Murder of Mother Nature: Healthy Eating for a Healthy Planet
for as long as she could before finally taking off her hat and slapping it in my lap. Shaved scalp right out there for all of northeast Missouri to see, “If we need anything else we'll be sure to let you know,” she said. The girl kept her eyes lowered to the floor all the way back to the kitchen.

“C'mon, Chris, put it back on,” I pleaded, rubbernecking around the room, trying to gauge the fallout. It was after two and most of the lunchtime crowd had thankfully returned to work, but I didn't like the vibes I was getting from the old couple in the corner sharing a basket of barbecued chicken wings. You don't have to be working on a coke habit to be paranoid, but it doesn't hurt.

“Don't do this, Chris,” I said, her hat in my hand.

Christine set down her paperback. “Do what? Not wear a baseball hat? Yeah, right, how dare I.”

You learn how to fight in front of other people when you go on the road with a band. Heather began laying out her Tarot cards between the water glasses, cutlery, and ketchup bottle. Thomas picked up Christine's book.

“This time tomorrow we're going to be in the South,” I said. “The South, Chris.”

“So what you're saying is that I should get ready to be even more embarrassed of how I look and who I am.”

I set the cap down between us on the seat. I emptied another packet of sugar in my coffee and scoped the room for the nearest exit.

“Miss Christine, what's a kg?” Thomas said. He had her book opened up on the table in front of him.

It took Christine a couple of seconds to figure out what he was talking about. “It's a kilogram—a way of weighing things,” she said. “It's about two pounds.”

“Did y'all know it takes seven kilograms of feed grain, which takes about seven thousand kilograms of water, just to produce one kilogram of beef?”

Christine looked at me, then back at Thomas. Heather kept carefully laying down cards with one hand while happily squeezing Thomas's non-book-holding hand with her other. She'd said she wanted to do a reading for our trip south.

“And that one hamburger takes about as much water as you'd use in fifty showers?”

“Yeah, well, that's ... it's not good,” Christine said.

“You're damn right it's not good. It says here that as more and more water is being used to raise animals instead of for crops, millions of wells are going dry all over the world. Millions.”

Our waitress appeared beside the table juggling four steaming plates and trying her best not to look directly at Christine's bristly head. To Thomas, “You had the hot beef sandwich, right?” She set down his meal of beef and gravy over white bread first and then everyone else's. I never understood why he even bothered. He rarely did more than shove the food around on his plate for a few minutes before settling down to his real meal of a couple of cigarettes and coffee. Tonight he didn't even do that.

“Yes, ma'am, that's what I
was
having,” he said. “Before I got the facts. Before I got the
Word
.” He pushed his plate as far away from himself as possible.

“You mean you don't want your hot beef sandwich any more?”

“Indeed I do not.”

Heather flipped a final card before managing to get both hands around her dribbling, bulging burger. I had no idea what a Tarot card with a tower getting zapped by a lightning bolt meant and didn't want to find out. Heather was on the point of first-bite bliss when Thomas slowly pushed her burger plateward with two insistent fingers.

“Darlin',” he said, “I have only one question for you. Answer me truly once and for all and I will not ask you again. In my home state of Mississippi—the poorest state in the union—there still exist children in this day and age of jets and spaceships whose families go without running water. Now, listen closely to me, darlin'. With the rapid population growth, the increasing urbanization of invaluable wetlands, and the boom in destructive factory farms, ask yourself this: Are those fifty showers you're holding in your hands right now worth all the pain and suffering you are surely causing for this and future generations of underprivileged children?”

Heather's fingers were still wrapped tightly around the burger. She looked up at Thomas. “No?”

“That's my girl,” he said. He put her Fatburger back on the plate and nudged it off to the side of the table alongside his own rejected meal.

“We'll both have what Buckskin is having,” he said, pointing at my plate.

The waitress scratched the topmost floor of her beehive hairdo. “I'm gonna have to charge you for the burger and the roast beef sandwich,” she said.

Thomas grabbed his wallet and peeled out a fifty. He placed it on the edge of the table and stood up.

“A small price to pay for doing our part to help heal Mother Earth, aren't I right, Miss Christine?”

Christine smiled weakly and pulled on her baseball cap. Smoothed down the peak and back until it was tight on her head.

Thomas went off to the bathroom.

When he came back to the table five minutes later with his shades on and his own hat stuffed in his back pocket, I knew he'd had a snort. When his and Heather's second meal arrived she couldn't hide her disappointment, picked up and sniffed a piece of lettuce before putting it back down and nibbling suspiciously at her grilled cheese. Thomas looked on approvingly. He ate the dill pickle speared into his coleslaw with a toothpick and lit up a fresh cigarette.

“Ma'am?” he called out to the waitress, holding up his coffee cup. “Could Thomas trouble you for a refill?”

“BILL?”

“It's just me, go back to sleep.”

“What time is it?”

“Around five.”

 

“What's that smell?”

“Shhh, you're going to wake up Heather.”

“Where's Thomas?”

“He couldn't sleep either. He's having a smoke.”

“What's that smell?”

“Shhh, go back to sleep.”

“Is that chlorine?”

“What?”

“You smell like chlorine.”

“You're crazy.”

“Why do you smell like chlorine at five o'clock in the morning?”

“Go back to sleep, Chris.”

“Bill ...”

“Go back to sleep.”

“Bill ...”

EVEN A BROKEN WHEEL can keep turning for a little while. But then Thomas got bored. To his credit, he tried not to be. But Thomas wasn't the kind of person to tell himself what to do. Thomas did what he was. And by the time we hit San Antonio what he wasn't was interested in our live shows any more. Truth was, I wasn't much either. But, then, I didn't have to stand up there in front of an audience for two hours and pretend to be. I only had to keep the beat. But he tried. You couldn't say he didn't try.

In Memphis, during our first-ever Deep South musical date, all at once his voice was all southern-honeyed charm. You always could tell he was from around down there, but now he sounded like he'd never left. It was a little ramshackle joint out by the airport full of white people who worked at the factories outside the city, but it was still Memphis, Tennessee. There was an organ on stage and we played every Stax-styled tune Thomas had taught us with him at the keyboard and Slippery taking over the low-tone vocal parts. Most of the songs we hadn't performed since we left Yorkville, but by the time we got to Sam and Dave's “You Got Me Hummin'” we really were, dishing out big fat chunks of greasy
Duckhead soul, steel guitar oddly accenting every beautifully filthy vocal chop-chop, Thomas's tripped-out rhythm changes turning around and around the R&B beat.

But every time the audience thought they knew what they were getting—basically, twang-tinged rhythm and blues pulled apart and pumped right back out by three skinny white hippies and an old man in an old suit—Thomas would avoid the tackle and outfox the defence and do a musical end run: a fuzz-drenched number like our own “Early Morning Overcast”; a plain-old hard-core country number like “She Thinks I Still Care”; a straight-ahead rock and roll chestnut like “Lucille” done up in high wah-wah style that anybody who could hear the beat and had two feet knew wasn't black or white but only a good old boogying time. The jammed dance floor never stopped moving long enough to wonder what it was sweating to. Thomas finished things up with, “Y'all been as fine an audience as we've been lucky enough to play for as long as I can recall, and remember that even the itty-bittiest little animal has got rights too, you know, and peace in your city and have a good night.”

In Dallas it wasn't the audience but us that Thomas ended up working to win over. The Lone Star Saloon was a phony country and western place with brass railings and glass coffee tables and mirrors everywhere you looked with the country-shmoltz stylings of Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold pumped over the club's sound system. The pot-bellied men all wore big white cowboy hats and the women expensive dangling earrings in the shape of the state of Texas, but I had more country soul in the tip of one of my split ends. Thomas tried to make friends with the crowd by instructing Slippery to cool it with his Evil Kineval steel-guitar licks and guiding us through nearly an entire set's worth of traditional country tunes played as straight as we could manage, but the audience looked almost as listless as we felt.
When Thomas tried to get something going with a steel-guitar-warped version of Chuck Berry's “Roll and Roll Music,” they went from apathetic to irate, the women staring out at the empty dance floor through slit-eyes, the men repeatedly taking off their hats and putting them back on like they couldn't decide whether to leave them on or not while they lynched us.

Thomas announced we'd be back in fifteen minutes and shut off his mike. “Everybody inside Christopher,” he said. “We're going for a ride.” Forty minutes later we were back for our second set with a couple of notable differences.

For starters, everybody but Slippery was righteously messed up on half a bottle of very expensive Sauzo Tres Generaciones bought at a nearby liquor store and consumed at Thomas's insistence while we drove around looking for a store that Thomas said he'd recognize when he saw it.

Second, when we finally stepped out onto the stage in front of about half the audience that'd originally been there when we'd started, each of us—Heather in her usual spot off stage included—was wearing not only a shit-faced grin but a silver silk turban. Thomas had left Christopher running and us guessing and bought the things at some sleazy backstreet boutique. Five minutes later, in between gulps from the bottle of tequila, he passed around the turbans and explained that they were something the old R&B groups in the fifties used to wear so they'd look more East Indian than Negro and get more bookings, and that if those ignorant crackers back at the bar wanted to treat us like spades then, by God, we were going to give them what they wanted. He'd made sure that each person's turban had his or her very own different-coloured fake jewel stuck right in the middle. By the time we got back to the club and the bottle was half empty it all made sense.

We ramshackled right in with a sloppy version of Ray Charles' “What'd I Say,” a tune we'd never even practised that Thomas
walked us through out in the parking lot, and things only got funkier from there. Even when we finally played something the ten or fifteen couples left in the place recognized—one of Patsy Cline's sugary ballads, “I Fall to Pieces”—the stinging electric guitar runs Thomas choked off every time the tune's title was sung by everybody (off-key me included) in our highest, loudest falsettos made it sound nothing like a gentle lament to a long-lost love and everything like an unrequited psychotic's suicide note set to molar-rattling music.

When the bar's owner, another little man in a big hat, said he was only going to pay us half of what he was supposed to, take it or leave it, Slippery handed Heather his turban and grabbed the man by his wide collars and threw him back across the bar. “I've got an Arkansas mortgage to pay, Hoss,” he said. “And nobody's taking money out of my pocket.”

We got paid, in full, and stopped at the nearest motel to continue the party, the baddest rock and rolling, country and westerning, motherfucking music-making outlaws anybody'd ever seen. At least that's what we kept telling ourselves as we finished off a couple of six-packs of Pearl and skinny-dipped in the motel pool, the full autumn moon illuminating our silver turbans as we water-bugged around and around, careful to keep our jewelled heads aloft in the warm Texas night. Slippery, still in his suit, smoked in a recliner and kept an eye on the front desk.

Later, Christine and I even made it while everyone else waited for us at the 24-hour coffee shop next door, the first time since a brief spell of near-constant randiness on my part right after I'd started in on the coke.

In Austin, at the Broken Spoke, we played to what was just about our ideal audience. The brush-cut and big-haired two-stepping crowd was already there waiting for us, and we brought in the bizarro element ourselves by way of an interview we'd done the
afternoon of the gig on a local college radio station. Colin had told us that as we got closer to our recording rendezvous with him in L.A. and our coming-out party at the Whisky A Go Go, the Electric Records people would start setting up publicity spots for us in the more knowledgeable markets.

I was taking a leak in the radio station washroom before we were supposed to go on the air when Thomas came in and dragged me into one of the stalls and practically stuffed a line up my nose. I didn't put up any protest. The day's inaugural snort wasn't coming around early enough for me either. We giggled all the way down the hall like a couple of school kids sneaking a smoke in the can.

In the cramped studio the guy who interviewed us knew what he was talking about, Electric had done its homework. He wore a green headband and a STOP THE BOMBING! button on his jean jacket, but asked Thomas all about what he meant by Interstellar North American Music and how he was influenced as much by Little Richard as Hank Williams and everything else the Electric Records press release he'd received said. The interview was supposed to be with all of us, but Thomas ended up doing most of the talking. The sound of him crunching on a carrot from the plastic bag he'd taken to carrying around sent the sound meters into the red, but he came across loud and clear.

It probably didn't, but it did make for damn good radio. When the interviewer concluded by asking what people who weren't all that familiar with country music could expect from our show and Thomas answered, “Heartaches, sore feet, and fleshless Satori. And please remember to tip your waitress. They're working girls just like the rest of us,” a few people must have decided to come on down just to see what this freak show was all about.

We never played better. Thomas got so into his “Dream of Pines” duet with Christine that he closed his eyes and waltzed around with an imaginary partner during her mandolin solo and fell off the stage and into the crowd, which thought it was all a part of the act. And the people standing at the edge—shorthairs and longhairs, truckers and tokers standing a little uneasily there side by side—caught him in their outstretched arms and pushed him back up just in time for him to sing the next verse and he didn't miss a word.