Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  “Moleosophy?”

  “The study of moles and their meaning. I have one on the aureole of my left nipple. Look, see?” Robbie looks. “It means I’m an active, energetic person. Want to meditate?”

  He shrugs. Can’t hurt. Rosie whispers to him his confidential personal mantra, cupping her hand to his ear – forrum – and shows him the lotus position.…

  He has trouble concentrating. Not just because he’s stoned, and not because he’s at a rock concert; it’s just that the benefit of repeating a Sanskrit word over and over in his head and picturing nothing but a white screen, utter nothingness, for twenty minutes, frankly eludes him. Dad would probably laugh that it shouldn’t be such an impossible task for Robbie of all people, but he’d never appreciate the real problem: Robbie’s Sanskrit word sounds too much like the Montreal Forum, and Yvan Cournoyer and the Canadiens keep skating in to push a puck around and score on the power play. In his mind Robbie calls an end to the period and brings on the Zamboni to clear the ice of tuques and ice-cream wrappers and frozen spit, in slow ovals, and fill his mind again with utter white. But it’s futile. He opens his eyes a fraction and peeps over at Rosie. She’s sitting with an upright back and her fingers poised, her eyes wide open, vicariously enjoying his perfect transcendence.…

  “Good try!” she says. “Now gimme your palm. Boy, I’m reading everything these days. Tea leaves, toenails, bus transfers, toast. Fate leaves fingerprints all over the place.”

  Everything except intelligent books, thinks Robbie the Big Reader, rolling his eyes. He knows Rosie wants his palm only to make physical contact with him, and her extreme eagerness makes him retreat farther. Though in the end his curiosity wins out.

  “Ivy?” Rosie says. “Lemme see. Hmm. No, I don’t think so. I don’t see her in your future at all.”

  He pulls away, wipes the damp on his jeans.

  Rosie shrugs, then crosses her arms to pull off her tank-top; points her toes in the air, and slips off her tights. Then she stretches out on her belly beside him in a minuscule black bikini, closes her eyes, and demands he oil her all over.

  “I’m so short-sighted I can’t see the stage anyway,” she says. “You can give me the play-by-play while I listen.”

  How cheap and greasy mascara looks in the bright sun, he thinks. He examines her body, sees how her curves are traced with swirling trails of hair – not dyed black like the hair on her head, but gold as a bumblebee – on her cheeks, on her arms, down her back too. Her shoulder blades like wings. Her wasp waist. The startling rise of her rump and the tantalizing shadow where her bikini-bottom spans the valley; her golden down disappearing there like a pollinated path.

  He looks up to see a couple of guys, hairy as buffalo, ogling her too. He gives them a defiant look, like: Bug off, this is MY queen bee. Pours a palmful of baby oil on her back, and works it in. Rosie reaching back with one arm and deftly unhooking her bra. But after Robbie sees them turn away, he thumbs her flesh without enthusiasm again. He’s really saving himself for Ivy. Just because Rosie and he made out last winter in an episode he’d rather not dwell on right now thank you very much, doesn’t mean he’s committing himself, exactly.

  Soon he’s aware of her standing up. He hears her voice, up in the clouds, saying she’s going in search of a Johnny-on-the-Spot. He watches her buzz off as he remains cross-legged on the beach towel, his fizzing warm bottle between his thighs, all pumped up as happy and buoyant as a multicoloured hot-air balloon.

  Now his perception has become microscopic. With the hot bubbles of alcohol burping up the back of his nose and tickling his nostrils, and the sun gripping onto his shoulders for a blazing piggyback, his focus is all on the skin of his hands and feet. The land map of veins and freckles is pocked and reddened from the grit embedded there; swatches of grass are mashed into his ankles, fallen asleep from hours of sitting, and the tiny criss-crossings of his skin are like landing strips on a pinkish plain. The grit like scattered boulders. The blue veins like monster worms. And up above, his eyelids feel huge, lowering as slow and heavy as canvas awnings over the entire world. He swallows to pop the underwater pressure in his ears. More bomblets of cider explode in his nose like tiny depth-charges. Bathysphere of booze. He’s going down, safe and sound and abso-tively posi-lutely answerable to no one…

  … when he eventually came down, Rosie still hadn’t returned. That was the first thought he had given her in an hour. Or two. Well, the crowd was humongous, she was bound to get lost for a while. After ten more minutes, however, he grew anxious. Maybe she didn’t like him any more; maybe she had taken off. With someone else. He twisted around and craned his neck to find her, but the crowd was too immense.

  Then he caught sight of her, and she was wandering off in the wrong direction. He thought of yelling, but there was no point–the music was way too loud, and he’d be risking his life to call out in English in dis crowd – so he just stood and waved, like a castaway on a desert island. She drifted off aimlessly, like a boat with a luffed sail. He fired a shot into his temple and rolled his eyes. Now pepsis were shouting at him to sit down; the buffalo guys threatened to tie his shoelaces together if he didn’t.

  Rosie was a bobbing pinpoint on a sea of bodies, tacking back, more or less. Veering off again. Now only ten or twenty paces away. She wore a worried expression, not much else. He shrugged and sat down. She was so close, surely he didn’t have to call out. She stepped right by.

  The buffalo guys wolf-whistled. One of them, an oily polka-dot bandanna bunching up his stringy hair, stroked her hand and cooed, “Taberouette, t’es ben cute, toi. Viens faire un tour par ici.”

  Rosie looked down at him angrily, whipping her hand away, and said, “Fuck off, you stupid boy. I can’t understand a thing you’re saying, but I know I don’t like it. I’m trying to find my friend.”

  “Ayy baby,” he said, “come ere an sit in my lap. Qu’est-ce qu’y a, j’fais pas ton affaire?”

  The other one had a row of fleurs-de-lis tattooed across his shoulders. He grabbed her ankle. Rosie shrieked. “Ayy baby,” the animal said. “Chus pas assez grand pour toi? Viens donc ici an sit on my face.”

  Before Robbie could decide what to do, she had wrenched herself free and, kicking the guy squarely in the chest, toppled over backwards and landed with a plonk on her own towel.

  “Bob!” she said with a wobbly voice, and Robbie saw in the bright sun how flecks of mascara were suspended in her tears.

  “Why didn’t you shout where you were? I was scared. I couldn’t find you.”

  “Hey,” he said, irritated. He held it against her that she should allow herself to be seen crying. Ivy never would. She wouldn’t allow you to have such a picture of her, like a drooling animal, in your memory. “Don’t cry, K? People’re looking. Really, Rosie, why don’t you just wear glasses. Or contacts, if you’re so vain?”

  She looked at him wildly. Her lip was trembling. She rolled her gum into a hard little ball and pinned it between her front teeth. “Bob, I think I hate you. I’m being hassled by a couple of goons and you’re embarrassed cause I’m crying? Fuck off, you stupid jerk.”

  “Uh, gee, Rosie.” He put his hand on her knee. “I’m sorry. You mix me up, that’s all.”

  She brushed it away. “Yeah, isn’t that typical. I’m being threatened with rape, and you want to talk about your personal crisis. Well, take off if you can only think about yourself, OK?”

  She turned her head in the direction of the stage. Robbie watched her with nervous interest. She was batting her soggy eyelashes and chewing her mouth. He knew she wasn’t enjoying the concert; that more than anything she wanted to talk. And sure enough: “I mix you up, do I, you poor confused thing? Here’s what you should know about me, then: I don’t wear glasses so I don’t have to see all the goons who want to hassle me. It’s OK if I only have to hear them, well, it’s partly OK, but if I look them in the face I’m DOOMED. That’s all they want, and I won’t give them the pleasure.”

  “W
hat about working at your club, then?” Robbie said, superciliously. He’d been wanting to get around to this for a long time. “All men do there is stare, and you give them lots of pleasure.”

  “But standing real close and staring the customers down is, well, it’s different – it’s like, when they look into their drink as if they’ve found something floating around in it, they’re just like little boys. And anyhow, the bouncers protect me in there. Out in the REAL world I don’t want to see too clearly.”

  “But, Rosie, maybe if you didn’t, uh, dress the way you do, you wouldn’t attract so much, you know, attention.”

  Rosie punched him in the arm and gave him a resentful glare. “You sound like a politician,” she said, her voice clogged. “What should I wear? Rusty spiky armour? Why should I change the way I dress? Sexy is fun, although the way most men behave, you’d think it was a THREAT. Why should I change the way I dress. Men should change their minds, instead, like, turn ’em in and get a new, improved model.” She blew her nose on her towel. “I’m all forlorn now, Bob. I want to leave.”

  Robbie felt shitty. Truly he did. He held her arm, like a male nurse, guiding her through the crowd. On the bus he stared hard at anyone who might be curious as to why her eyes were wet. The bus passed through Westmount, only one stop to the park now. He prepared to stand up, taking her hand.

  “Oh no, not me,” Rosie said. “I’m going all the way home. Alone please.”

  Robbie pulled a glum face, real hangdog, like the sun and the dope had warmed and softened it to Silly Putty. He slumped his head down between his shoulder blades He held onto her hand sorrowfully, gave it an ingratiating squeeze. At last she looked at him.

  “Bob!” Squinting in disbelief, shifting her weight away to get a better look. “You look so sad. Have I really upset you? Wow. Now, that – is – DYNAMITE!”

  In the middle of Westmount Park was a brightly painted booth equipped with a sound system, known in the neighbourhood as the Kiosk. There was a concrete clearing around it, with blistered wooden benches, provided by the municipality to keep all the trouble in one place. Across the park, past the swings and past the library on Sherbrooke Street, you could always hear the supreme heaviosity of guitar riffs, whumping out over the trees.

  It was mostly Anglo-Quebeckers who gathered there, Westmount High students, famous in the city for the achievement of being perpetually stoned. (Years ago Robbie’s parents had refused to send him there for fear of Bad Influences, but look now, he thought, at least this school is still standing.) These cats liked to just hang out, revving their bikes, perching on the backs of the benches like patched-up parrots, smelling of patchouli and savage B.O. They smoked joints and grooved, sunlight flashing off the little mirrors embroidered into their Indian-cotton frog shirts. And the main thing was that to maintain your cool, you had to act unfriendly. You had to sit there looking like a Strolling Bones album cover, just being a lizard with a sewed-up mouth, sitting in twilight, in the crack between worlds, Castaneda-wise, not releasing a drop of emotion. Now Robbie wondered why he’d come. He looked around him with a sinking heart. He’d been so up until he saw these long faces, these indolent bystanders, these pseudo-hippies gone prematurely to seed, still waiting, he observed sourly, for another generation’s revolution, still playing someone else’s old romantic records. The Lugs. The Head. The Yores. He knew better. The CIA had defused the sixties by bombarding the hippie community with downer drugs and chemical mindfucks. If you doubt it, just look around. Like, six blocks over and a short hike up the hill Canada’s coming apart, it’s having a revolution all of its own, and none of these turkeys even knows about it. To Robbie, the sixties was a dirty word; he’d found out what a scam it all was – just before the fire razed his school down to several rows of seared gym lockers, he’d caught a glimpse of how it all worked – he’d been backstage. Ivy had shown him.

  Brat was here, wearing a Vietnam combat jacket with the sleeves pinned up to reveal his thalidomide hands – fins really, crab claws without a shell – which he was now using to pass on a roach, with surprising dexterity, the strange economical speed of dwarfs. He was cool as all get out; he acknowledged Robbie and Rosie’s arrival by blinking slower than normal.

  Louie Louie called out heartily. “Ayy, allô, white man! Taberslaque! You can see your religion in dose pant!” Big hulking Louie Louie in army surplus shit-kickers and a brown bomber jacket as buffed and battered and caked in dirt as the hide of the old bull itself. Extending a meaty fist. Yes, Louie Louie was a pepsi, the son of the janitor at Westmount High, and once assistant janitor himself, who’d been embraced by the Westmount clique by virtue of the high-quality weed he dealt; he used to store the stuff in toilet rolls, high up on a stockroom shelf where his bent old man could not reach, and open shop in the cans at lunch hour. That was before Officer Gaunt made a goodwill appearance, on tour with his lecture entitled, Pot or Not? and brought in his dog for an inspection of the premises. The way Louie Louie talked about it now, is papa was taken de hearly retirement, hosti.

  Joggers and mothers passing by with prams looked askance at the tribe, and Robbie felt pleased to be thought of as party to trouble. Louie Louie was such a gronker, closer to seven feet than to six, his hair short as a GI’s, his eyebrows shaved off, eyes as dull as gunpowder, neck as thick and dirty as a tire; he now worked in a poultry factory at the eastern end of the city, where it was his job to chop the little beaks off newly hatched chicks to prevent them from pecking one another to death in the overcrowded cages where they were fattened for slaughter.

  “I’m also reading The Bible and Flying Saucers,” Rosie announced, pulling yet another ragged paperback from her beach bag. She held it up for Brat to see, pointing to the photographs as if teaching a baby. “It’s like, when you read Psalm 104:3, He makes the clouds his chariot, what do you think that really means, guys?”

  Robbie passed buttons of mesc around, popping one right into Brat’s mouth.

  “No, really,” Rosie said, accepting one with her tongue stuck out and then placing Robbie’s hands on her shoulders and making his fingers massage the muscles there. “What does it mean?”

  “It means you shouldn’t believe everything you read,” said Robbie, who was reading nothing at the time. And his hands had turned to wood.

  Time passed and people sat. It was incredible how the Anglo cats there could sit and sit and sit, saying zilch in either of Canada’s official languages, not least Robbie himself, with his KEEF SUCKS T-shirt proclaiming the sum total of his commitment to the maintenance of intelligent life on our fair planet.

  Half an hour later he was feeling brutally nauseous, which was a welcome change in tempo, at least. By then Rosie had turned away to read the palm of some furry freak in a crushed-velvet shirt. Robbie observed them with a seasoned stoner’s intellectual disdain. These people, with their ankhs and vibes and karma and signs. This bullshit, this time-wasting, this inertia, this empty decade. The only authentic thing they’d inherited from the sixties, he thought, was a terminal case of superstitious mind-warp. The vanity, he thought, to imagine you’re part of some cosmic plan, that you can find a personal reference to yourself in any cheap paperback index of the zodiac. And still in his mind he was stuck on Ivy, Ivy again, who was addicted to reality (so she used to say), and the last he saw of her in the hot smoke: her glistening wrists, slipping from his grasp…

  He went off to throw up in the bushes, returning, immensely relieved, to wash the mesc’s soapy taste down with beer…

  … he hears himself say something, to no one in particular, pigs, fuck,

  in two voices, one for each ear, out of sync like an effect on a heavy record; the one euphoric, made light with giddy foolish amusement – the source of which he can’t determine at all – the other flat and foul as death’s own burp. He’s frightened by the intensity, the sudden shift, and his skin crawls.

  And in fact has anyone, may I ask, seen or heard about Ivy?

  Yow! Eek! These are Brat’
s first words. The devil’s own daughter.

  Two hours now Robbie’s pelvic bones have ground against the bench, and at last the lamplit world begins to bloom. The stained-glass park slips and slides all around them, peeling away like the acetate cells of an animated cartoon. The multicoloured leaves appear gloved in a malleable varnish, and each one has a distinct musical personality. The trees now chiming. Sucking up tones from the Earth’s core and dispersing them into the star-filled air. The chocolate-brown earth humming. And the four of them on their backs watching this verdant orchestra in its bonging bowl of midnight blue milk, speaking only in bursts.

  School’s fucked, he hears himself say. Heh. I mean look at me. If this is the best they can do.

  A crescent moon flits by like a swallow, white as talc, leaving seventy-five powdery tattoos of itself across the stomach of the sky.

  Uff, the gronker goes. Uff uff.

  Robbie watches a crystal-mint leaf detach itself from a twig and tinkle down. And an epiphany, playing itself out like the tumbling flakes in a kaleidoscope: we’re all rushing down the cosmic flow. Consciousness is just an illusion. We only think we’re thinking. Thoughts are only circuits flashing, we’re really juicy robots programmed into this microchip galaxy. Man, I hope I remember this later. Turning his neck and through his jellied windowpanes he sees Brat on his back with a foot propped on a knee and his head on a swollen root, still and solid, enamelled like a garden gnome with his arms chipped off.

  Bob, Rosie says. I see love colours when I ball. You?

  Robbie turns to her. He likes Rosie’s ski-jump nose, her plummy lips, but she’s too, he has to say it to himself at the end of the day, too clingy. She doesn’t hold a candle to Ivy, who showed so little affection that when she did touch you, you knew she probably meant it. Frankly, he’s turned off by the way Rosie likes to hug all the time in public places, pressing her nose behind his ear and making his neck wet with her breath; demanding epic-length backrubs and smelling as she does of frangipani and Bubble Yum. When she clambers onto him like she has now, squeezing his waist with her thighs, he thinks with distaste of what he’s read in Bosom Buddies magazine about girls enjoying horses between their legs due to a phenomenon known as equus eroticus. He’s embarrassed for her; he figures a person should communicate their sexual style subtly, not announce it like some three-ring circus. He makes like a lizard with a sewed-up mouth.…