Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  Sitting up an hour later, he’s coming down a little, and look now, tottering along in his direction: Rosie. Balanced precariously on a pair of purple Candies, desperately short-sighted, scrunched-up paperback in one hand, pencil in the other busily underlining, Rosie periodically looks up at the world with her repertoire of perplexed expressions, stepping off sidewalks with the abandon of a person stepping off a cliff, recognizing objects only at the last minute – apologizing to a car – all the while having, it looks like, some intense dialogue with the spirits of her fuzzy universe; listen to this, sky; listen, flowers; listen, lovely old building. Robbie lies back on the grass hoping she’ll go by.

  She doesn’t.

  “Bob, hey wow! How ya DOIN? I can’t believe my eyes, you’re just the PERSON! I was just thinking; why do men have to spit in the street? I mean what, do they have more saliva than women?”

  She plops down on the grass, her temples streaming with perspiration. Robbie examines her closely, still seeing the world in flashes through a mushrooming fish-eye lens: in the beautiful metal sunset – copper and sodium flashes, nickel and cadmium sparks – the pores of her cheek are big as pockmarks, and each one contains a drop of radioactive rainbow water…

  She crosses her legs like scissors, reverses them; and again, and tucks a hand snugly between her thighs. Only to unfold herself as if she’s been found out doing something wrong.

  “Wow,” she says when she sees his eyeballs shuttle. “First time I see you in MONTHS and you’re already making me self-conscious. You should know I DO that, Bob, because of my DADDY. I’ve always embarrassed him sitting this way. But I like to when I’m feeling forlorn. I want to have a baby.” She tilts her chin up proudly, sweeps her hair behind her ears, pulls it out again, wraps it around her fingers and sucks the end of a tress. Clacks her gum, squints at the street, and pushes her other hand between her thighs. Stops. “I know I know, don’t LOOK at me like that – I’m just a chamber of horrors, aren’t I? In my own abusement park.”

  Robbie sticks his index finger to his temple and cocks his thumb back to blow his brains all over the Church of St. Anthony’s lawn.

  “You never called,” she says, resting her head on his shoulder. “And now I can see that you hate me. I’m not blind, you know.”

  Rosie’s fleshy and pink as the gum she loves to blow. And she smells of the stuff, which she chews with a vengeance. Robbie catches an image of the time she once bit her lip too hard in anger, the gum appearing between teeth streaked with blood like ruddy marble. Now she’s obviously fresh from an afternoon shift at L’Enfer Strip; she resembles an ancient Egyptian vampire–black lipstick, black leather mini-skirt, slashed black tank-top (nipples as large as raw bee-stings, he sees so close, and the stitches of her bra strap spun from crackling plutonium), pale white flesh showing through slashed black tights, jet black hair spiked upwards with sugar and water – just like, she says, these so-called punks are starting to do in England.

  “Hey, Rosie,” Robbie says lazily. “Check this. See the Queen on the dollar bill? And on the back, the Prairies divided in two by the infinite road?” (The paper money’s opening up to him like a Cinerama screen. He doesn’t know about her, but he can even hear the wind combing the wheat…)

  Rosie squints. “Uh huh.”

  “Watch as I roll it.”

  “Oh, I don’t do that stuff, thank you. My metabolism’s way too speedy. I know cos I’m reading about the eerie case histories of feral children. Also, anorexia nervosa, amenorrhea, coela-canths, the Gaia hypothesis, and Velikovsky’s startling predictions which have actually challenged contemporary science. What do you think?”

  “Pay attention, Rosie, please. Look into it, like a telescope.”

  “Yeah, OK, so?”

  “See the Queen standing by the road now with her thumb out?”

  “No.”

  “Farm out! She must’ve hitched a ride.”

  Rosie frowns, snatches the bill to examine it closer. Robbie rolls his eyes in disbelief. Then he drifts off, reflecting grimly on the fact that not a single American has side-stepped that menacing shadow of his all afternoon. The shadow has lengthened, he’s feeling smaller. He shrugs and woozily thinks, I seem tame to Yanks because they’re so jaded. Well, who wants to be like them. I’m glad I’m a decent fucken upstanding Canuck. Then he timbers back onto the grass and blacks out.

  It was dusk when he was shaken awake. Two men were standing above him: a priest and a cop. He knew the cop.

  “Glorious sunset that was. A real Michelangelo,” said Officer Gaunt, ever affable, smiling behind his scrawny shrub of a beard, his red eyes watery like he’d been laughing till he cried. Even when his beloved German shepherd had keeled over (Robbie’s first unsavoury thought on awakening) after some asshole had mixed Drano into his dog food, Gaunt persisted with his relentless bonhomie. And now he was making an extra-nice face for Robbie’s benefit and holding open the rear door of his car like a chauffeur.

  “Where’re we going,” Robbie called out from the back. “Dog pound? Pick out a new mutt?”

  His tongue curled up like a snail. Up front, just the sound of the two-way and the cruiser’s engine straining up Côte-des-Neiges’ steep incline towards Beaver Lake. He stared at Gaunt’s red neck, splotchy where the regulation cut was freshly clipped. The short hairs on the nape of Robbie’s own neck creeping, like someone was petting him the wrong way.

  “Hey, sorry ’bout your woof,” he said, leaning forward all contrite with his nose divided in four by the grill. “Wonder what asshole would of done a fucken thing like that.”

  They had come around to the north side of the mountain, taking the long way home for sure, overlooking the Notre-Damedes-Neiges cemetery now. The smog was a purple haze above the gravestones. Gaunt pulled the cruiser over. A couple of cars drove past. Robbie slunk down in his seat.

  Gaunt rested his arm on the top of the front seat and turned, speaking over his shoulder. “Why do you deliberately make life tough on yourself?” His trademark tones of exasperation. “With all your privilege, lad.”

  “Hey, hey – you a cop, or a parent?”

  Gaunt scratched his beard and sighed. “So tell me, since we’ve not yet had the pleasure of a heart-to-heart. I’ve been asked to ask you – how’d you manage to – you know – do what you did?”

  The base of Robbie’s spine slick beneath his T-shirt now. “I dunno. What?”

  “Jesus crawl back on the cross for comfort. Just tell me, please.”

  “Oh. Rescue my girlfriend you mean? Too much, am I getting an award?”

  “No, not in a manner of speaking. Though that was a very heroic thing you did there.”

  “Have you heard from her?”

  “No, but her father says, and I quote, if you so much as dream of her he’ll recommend you get a horsewhipping.”

  “Yeah, so. I could care less. He already made a pitch for that, fuck. Luckily my Dad sent him a memo which said that horsewhipping is against family policy.”

  “You and Ivy ever spend time in the attic?”

  “The… school attic? Uhh, let me think. Uhh, no.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Not even once?”

  “Never, I said.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Sure you’re sure?”

  “Fuck, I was in class the whole time, ask anybody… can I go now?”

  Gaunt turned the ignition, pulled the cruiser back onto the road. “Okey doke,” he said, and sighed.

  In five minutes they were in front of the Bookbinders’ home. Robbie could see, with some relief, that no cars were in the driveway and the lights in the house were off.

  “Fuck off now, do,” Gaunt said, smiling in the dash light like a satanic butler. “There are people, you know, myself included, who worship the ground that’s coming to you.”

  Later that night, while Dad snored and Cournoyer scored to clinch the Habs a reprieve
in overtime, Robbie was upstairs snooping. Ears primed like a bat’s, he pulled out forbidden drawers and tried on a few dainty ensembles. Not as much fun as it sounds; Mom so mistrusted him that the antique armoire was almost certainly booby-trapped – drawers left open and shut with only apparent randomness, bras and stockings flung in with only apparent abandon. It made him knot his cheeks and gnash his teeth and lose his boner to be forced to remember so many sneaky details, to put everything back exactly where it was in the first place. And did sweaty fingers leave visible stains on satin panties? Would his big feet leave an impression in silk stockings? Would his animal toenails make them run? And would Mendoza, the family dog who is now panting and slobbering at the bedroom door, somehow stool on him?

  He rifled through Dad’s desk (him too – envelopes, pens, and keys arranged in incredibly devious asymmetries) and plundered the pockets of a pair of big elephant-brown baggy-ass pants that lay in a trampled mound at the foot of the bed, thinking all the while that at the end of this energetic day you could hardly accuse him of a lack of curiosity, not knowing what his old man did. Exactly. It was plainly that: the Generation Gap being what it was in the mid 1970s, communication at home was as rare, as slim, as bogarted (in his expert estimation), as a joint rolled with prime Hawaiian hay. The end. All parents must die.

  2

  FOLLOWING MORNING, AFTER HIS SHOWER, HE STOOD IN front of the mirror and swabbed a patch clear. His hair was kite string tangled in a tree. His body plump-white and muscleless as a larva. And pizza-face, gross himself out. He leaned close, nose to the glass, nose to nose, chin to chin. And weird, eh, how elsewhere the universe was spiralling vastly, crackling with energy, and elsewhere the planet was busting apart with political crises and unnameable emotional traumas, and here his world had shrunk down, like a dwarf star collapsing in on itself, to his concern for this one little disgusting pimple. And so suicide was out of the question this week, for sure. Die young but leave a beautiful corpse, remember that.

  He squeezed himself into his bell-bottoms, squirmed around, doing knee bends, tiptoeing, till his cock and balls were reunited to one side like a squishy packet of Gummi Bears. Pulled on a paisley headband, a belt buckled with a Harley-Davidson eagle, plus his authentic Canadian regiment D-Day combat jacket with the red curtain fringes sewn on the cuffs and the Ban-the-Bomb patch on the back. He selected a T-shirt that bore an image of Keef Richards of the Strolling Bones, a photo taken just minutes before he’d died of a mysterious brain haemorrhage. (Or so it was rumoured; Robbie’d heard it otherwise said that the singer had injected himself with a horsecock-needleful of crystal meth, diluting it with water drawn up from a toilet bowl, and that he’d been careless – for apparently, Spit Swagger, the group’s drummer, had just thrown up in the same toilet, and Keef had neglected to flush it before dipping the syringe in. Robbie had yet to verify the truth of either story.) The image had been printed on a film of sticky plastic and ironed on at the Prairie Buffalo T-Shirt Emporium and Head Shoppe, in the Alexis Nihon Plaza. After three washes the cheap shit was already breaking up, but Robbie preferred it like that; the chips reminded him of the way oil paintings and frescoes crack apart after a century or two, and they invested Keef’s portrait with the decadence and intrigue associated with historical decline. Keef’s imperially bored expression registered no surprise at his own head exploding: the Twentieth Century Schizoid Man had kept his cool to the end. And there was a caption:

  KEEF LIVES

  over which Robbie had scrawled, in fat black Magic Marker,

  SUCKS

  “Oh. You look extremely GROOVY,” Rosie told him when she showed to pick him up. (Apparently, they’d made a plan – out on the lawn of the Church of St. Anthony – though he was fucked if he could remember what for, exactly.) He shot her back a nasty stare. He knew it wasn’t in her nature to be sarcastic, but just to be sure.

  Down in the dungeon they shared a beer. “I like this place,” she said, looking around. “It’s a living womb.” She curled a strand of hair around her index finger, thoughtfully. “I can never trust men, I’ve decided.” Tucking the hair behind one ear.

  “Yeah,” Robbie replied, good-naturedly, for he knew she couldn’t be thinking of him; he, Robbie the Gallant, exempt from the company of Men Women Don’t Trust.

  “Like for instance, you should have called me. We had a good time in the winter, I thought. What if I hadn’t never bumped into you yesterday?” Slipping a hand between her thighs, looking at the ceiling. “Boys smell like fast food, I think, which is too bad.…” Squinting at the marijuana leaf flag. “Anyway I’ve decided I’ll give myself a gin abortion if I have to. But I have to say I would still want the baby. In principle.” And opening them unself-consciously wide.

  “Chrissake,” Robbie said. “What happened?”

  “Oh, mellow out, Bob.” Clamping them shut. “Give me my space will you? Nothing happened. I’m just saying if. I mean, every time I’m alone with my boss he’s all over me. And, ouch, he’s so ROUGH. Here I am – delicate little Rose. Five-foot-six, forlorn, circulation cut off by pantyhose invented by men.”

  “Rosie, uh. Maybe the way you – maybe you, sort of, lead him on.”

  “Oh yeah, typical – see no evil…” she snapped, clacking her gum angrily at him now. “You and he and my Daddy would get along like houses on fire. I don’t LEAD the guy on. He doesn’t need to be led on.” Then she crossed her legs with what Robbie took as an expression of finality. And uncrossed them again.

  It was June 24th, she reminded him – St. Jean-Baptiste, Quebec’s Fête Nationale. So they took a Boulevard bus to Côte-des-Neiges and walked from there, high up to Beaver Lake, where Mount Royal’s southern plateau looked over the city and – on days when the wind blew the haze away – all the way to the St. Lawrence River.

  Robbie, who liked to sit right in front of the amplifiers, was stunned with disappointment to see how many people had got there before him. He staked out a little territory, as much as Rosie’s beach blanket would cover, somewhere in the centre of the anthill of humanity that bristled with flags and waving arms, and soon they were both lying beneath a big sky getting a buzz off a bottle of fizzing warm apple cider.

  All over the mountain, while the music played, children tugged on kites and families perspired around barbecues; French-Canadian hippies handed out political pamphlets and flags with fleurs-de-lis on them, mimes in whiteface did their utterly compelling act of standing still or being stuck inside glass boxes – the only whiff of violence (apart from the fact that the music was so loud fish were floating up dead on the surface of the lake) was a story that circulated in the crowd about an incident involving the Montreal chapter of the Satan’s Choice and their arch rivals the Dead Man’s Hands, over a cocaine deal. Another story had it that several of the bikers had gang-banged a teenage girl in the bushes, on the east side of the mountain under the giant electric crucifix. But there was so much peace and love and music and political fervour in the air that no one was about to get het up over a little thing like that.

  Robbie lay on his back watching smoke curl lazily upwards, listening to the music performed on a stage half a mile away, and thinking about how the word humanity has the word ant in it. The earth was a vast dish tipping, revolving vertiginously in a luminous universe, the centrifuge pulling him around like a great, lethargic fairground ride. He could barely see the stage at all, but there was so much sweet metal music spilling out from the banks of speakers, like a drawerful of cutlery crashing to the floor, that his skull was numb, and there was still enough noise left over to smack against the rows of houses at the edges of the park and bounce right back again.

  He tried to estimate how many people were there. It was certainly the biggest crowd he’d ever been in. Maybe even bigger than Woodstock!

  “A PARTIR D’ICI ET POUR UN AN!” the immensely popular Yvon Deschamps dictated into the microphone, his arms outstretched.

  “A PARTIR D’ICI ET POUR UN AN!” the crowd responded
as one massive, joyous voice from all over Mount Royal.

  “J’vais pas parler Anglais!”

  “J’VAIS PAS PARLER ANGLAIS!”

  “Dey’re not gonna speak Hinglish because dey don’t know ow to speak Hinglish,” Robbie chuckled to himself, splitting a match down the middle to make a flimsy roach-clip.

  Rosie squinted around and whistled low. “You know what, Bob? There’s a renaissance going on here. The best and heaviest music in North America, the best and heaviest BOOKS, the best ART, the heaviest POLITICS. It’s crazy, but right now there’s a genuine revolution happening, and no one in the outside world even knows about it.”

  “The best and heaviest dope,” Robbie murmured.

  Politics was not his strong point, but as far as he dug it, Quebec separatism went like this: the pea-soups had had it up to here with being bossed around by the Anglos, who had all the money and the culture and the smarts. It was Dad who called them pea-soups, because that was their national dish, but to Robbie’s generation they were pepsis – that’s because, and Robbie was sure he had read this in a scientific magazine, the average Québécois drinks eighteen gallons of pop a year; that’s tops in Canada and second only to certain southern U.S. states. Anyway, now the pepsis wanted a spot guaranteed on the hit parade, and in their own language; they’d tried bombings and kidnappings before, but today a whole lot of pepsis felt the only way to be was out of Canada altogether.

  That was it, in a nutshell. Robbie meanwhile is preoccupied with working enough spittle up in his dried-out mouth to moisten the end of an enormous spliff before the glowing tip falls off and burns Rosie’s back. And Rosie meanwhile has pulled a copy of The Compleat Illustrated Handbook on the Psychic Sciences from her beachbag.

  She rolls over, shows him. “Palmistry, astrology, dice-divination, cartomancy, moleosophy, dream interpretation, telepathy and ESP, graphology, yoga, and omens.”