Read Online Moody Food by Ray Robertson - Free Book Online

surprisingly good time to any number of raging rock and roll tunes, wopbobpaloobopa-wopbamboom black boy Little Richard neck and neck with piano-pummelling white boy Jerry Lee Lewis for the title of my all-time drumming favourite so far.
    Boom pop, boom boom pop, boom pop, boom boom pop.

10.
    â€œYOU?” Kelorn said.
    â€œYeah, me,” I said. “What’s so hard to believe about that?”
    The blowout between us of a few weeks before was by now long forgotten, me admitting that my yelling at Making Waves customers was not a sound business practice, Kelorn agreeing to let me have my full rootsy turn on the store turntable. Little Richard, therefore, in all his shrieking glory, implored Lucille to please come back where she belonged while Kelorn indexed a fat stack of new Making Waves volumes and I climbed up and down the room’s rolling wooden ladder, shelving this newest arrival under POETRY and that one under POLITICAL SELF-DEFENCE.
    Under the latter heading were several copies of the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada , the only book you could always count on taking home with you from Making Waves, a how-to-avoid-the-U. S.-draft guide published by a small Canadian press that Kelorn always made sure to have in stock and that was always gratis to whoever was legit in their need. Every week more and more nervous-looking guys my age and even younger with a
variety of American accents were dropping by the shop. The word was starting to get out that having a moral conscience wasn’t considered a crime in Canada and that the Making Waves Bookstore at 189 Harbord was a good place to find out how to keep your hands ethically clean and Vietnamese shrapnel out of your ass.
    â€œSometimes it seems like everybody I meet is a musician, so why not me?” I said. “Besides, it’s fun, you know? Bashing away for a couple hours is a good way to blow off steam. Almost as good as sex.”
    â€œNow, don’t start getting weird on me, Bill,” Kelorn said.
    I looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was close to six, nearly quitting time. Christine was coming by to pick me up to grab something to eat, but I was going to have to talk my way out of the movie we’d planned for after. Although I’d known for a couple of days now that tonight was going to be the night Thomas unveiled the rehearsal space he’d rented, a room on the third floor of a four-storey Victorian full of a bunch of other bands and located right smack dab between the Mynah Bird and the Penny Farthing, I’d neglected to tell Christine not only about Thomas’s bass-playing plans for her but also my own recent pillow-whacking drumming workouts. Mine was and still is, I guess, a mind not of the particularly confrontational kind, especially if things are rolling along just fine. But I’d tell her. Sooner or later.
    But sooner or later always eventually becomes right now, and right now right now meant Christine coming through the door of the shop and kissing me on the lips and Kelorn on the cheek and asking if she could put a poster up in the front window.
    â€œCertainly, dear. Where are you playing?” Kelorn said.
    â€œIt’s not for me,” Christine said, scotch-taping the hand-drawn flyer to the inside of the window. “It’s the Diggers. They’re organizing a ‘Shut Down Yorkville’ campaign because of all the traffic and pollution and stuff. Do you know what that fascist
Lamport said about Yorkville in the paper yesterday? ‘Frankly, I’d like to see it become a shopping centre.’ That’s an actual quote, I’m not kidding you. A shopping centre. Over my dead body, you fat, bourgeois pig, over my dead body.”
    A quick explanation and a guilty confession.
    The Yorkville Diggers were the Toronto arm of Haight-Ashbury’s Diggers, hippie do-gooders who worked hard to get free clothes, food, and medical attention to the swelling number of