Authors: Ray Robertson
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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
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 wasâ”
“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.”
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 justâ”
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 andâ”
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?