Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  Which is more or less all he did through July, and all through August, too. By the end of the month, however, he’d succeeded only in magnifying his savage libido, boiling himself in his own juices, like a bug floating in a glass of brandy left out in the sun. So he tried something new. What he did he did surreptitiously–he wouldn’t give anyone the satisfaction of knowing he was doing anything creative with his time – from his bedroom cupboard he pulled out his easel and oils, blew the dust off his palette, loaded up with a two-four of Molson and a cassette machine, and marched out with Mendoza to Maple Point to paint.

  He chose a promontory that commanded the long stretch of lake past Owl’s Head to the south, the pine-bristled Hogsback ridge rising up a mile closer, and nearer still, only there a year now, the EPX chemical factory. He stripped to the waist and took off his shoes and socks. Brown pine needles had made a thick soft mat on the ground, and a number of maples, leached of colour, had tumbled down the slope before him to soak and peel on the lakeshore. This spot had always been thickly camouflaged, just perfect for smoking reefer at a crouch; now the fallen trees permitted him to spread the easel’s legs several feet back from the ridge, plus his painting gear, his two-four, a blanket, the cassette player, and still designate a spot for Mendoza to slobber on.

  Weird thing was, from here the factory looked beautiful: nestled in the green valley of the Hogsback, its cluster of chalk-white chimneys, pipes, catwalks, gantries, and towers of scaffolding looked as pristine and alien as the Apollo moon unit in the Sea of Tranquillity. Whatever noise Mom said the factory made was drowned out by wind and wave. A delicate ribbon of white smoke rose from a central chimney, weaving languidly through the pines, tickling the back of the Hog. Robbie thought of the Group of Seven, years before S.P.E.C.T.R.E. seized power, trekking out across the Canadian Shield, writing their poetry amongst the crystal streams, struggling to express the massive, unspoiled, unspeakable beauty in words. How would Robbie, in his turn, do something original for himself and paint this land today? How do you paint invisible poolution, chlorophenols foliage erosion inhibited nitrogen fixation by symbiotic bacteria heavy metals in the soil fecula on the beach acid loadings all over Quebec and thanks to elevated levels of mercury in the sediments, worsening breakdown in the foodchain? He stood half-naked with a hot, carrot-fat reefer fuming between his lips, toking back smoke as thick as Plasticine, and like Keef Richards bent over his guitar, bore down on the bitter pleasure of depicting the apocalypse.

  Thing was, landscapes had never been his bag. He’d always preferred to get horny over nudes of the late nineteenth century. Statistics show that 99 per cent of teenagers conceal Bosom Buddies magazines in a drawer, but Robbie felt as much of that stewed-fig feeling coming on when he pored over nudes by Rubens and Bouguereau, sneaking them out of the parents’ library, stuffing the enormous volumes under his T-shirt as he tiptoed upstairs. Sure, these nudes were fatter than your average centrefold, but they never did anything frightening, like throw you a full frontal or pull apart the cheeks of their behinds for you to see all the bits you didn’t need to see. Art experts droned on and on about bogus concepts like affronts to popular morality, and superb mastery of the use of perspective, and allegorized portraits, and manifestos of sacred and profane love, but they never came out and said what they obviously meant. It was obvious enough to him what the painters had in mind with all that elaborate drapery snaking between the ancient models’ thighs, and all the surfaces of their bodies smooth and sugary, free of bum pimples and track marks. (Although Robbie never looked at girlie magazines, well, hardly ever, whenever he did he’d always check out their arms to see if they were junkies, which he figured would explain what drove them to exhibiting themselves so crudely.)

  The world in raging Stoner Vision! now, projected on a curved screen, like this were a scene in some lakeshore drive-in movie. A Hendrix tape unravelling Nature’s very DNA, as his knife-edged thrashing guitar-licks shred the air. Third Stone from the Sun. Robbie’s nose is thick with the sweet pungency of oil and linseed. He’s vigorously mixing earth into his paint, grass and bracken crushed between his damp palms, smutched with phthalo and burnt umber. Pure titanium white for the factory. When a bead of sweat soaks his eyebrows, he dabs at his forehead for some of that too. Mendoza’s panting. Robbie lunges with his paintbrush for the plipping tongue. Unwise. The dog snaps at him, barks, and takes off into the woods.

  Ivy had a body a lot like one of Rubens’ nudes: oblong and waxy pale. With wide feet. And a belly that swelled out like a Bouguereau. And breasts as pale and delicate as bubbles of milk that looked like they’d be cool in your palms. Ivy, who hated her body, and deliberately burned her arms with cigarettes when she got too drunk.

  Suddenly across the water there’s what looks like a crowd gathering. Some kind of kerfuffle. Vehicles, a dozen people maybe, right in front of EPX. Robbie’s squinting, it’s hard for him to tell from here – in this heat the surface of the lake buzzes and blinds. He clicks the tape off with his toe, standing stock-still to get a better listen, but now his ears are trampled under wind. He shrugs and toes the tape on again.

  In some of those old paintings, usually the ones featuring harems or hell or catastrophes befalling all of mankind, you could eyeball a dozen nudes at one time, the whole batch of them languishing in states of undress, some of them bound and helpless, some being ravished by Romans or devoured by monsters. You’d never find that in a magazine like Bosom Buddies. Robbie wonders if, while the paint was still wet and sexy on the canvas, the painters ever got it on with their models. He also wonders what it must have been like to see some of these paintings in a shop window in the days before magazines; if, in the privacy of their homes, people ever tugged off in front of them.

  He bends down to pick up a dead bee, sticks it rudely into a blob of cadmium yellow. Thinks about something Mom has said – that honey bees are particularly sensitive to air pollution, and that when they suffer so does the pollination of plants, seed production, and the fundamental regrowth of vegetation. Right, and everything gives you cancer.

  Oh, here’s Mendoza back at last, and what’s he got in his jaws. A rat? Robbie’s moving in air as heavy as the linseed oil, cumulo nimbus weighing heavy on his shoulders. He bends down. Here, boy. Show me. Chrissake! A chipmunk. Without any hair.

  He sits down to clear his brain. Becomes aware of his sunburnt cheeks, stretched over the bone. On the opposite shore the crowd has clustered tightly together. Round a particular tree, it looks like. A sound cuts across the water: a chainsaw. Then the crack and crunchy tumble of the tree, booing, chanting, and finally a police siren, swallowed up by the wind. Meanwhile, Mendoza’s licking the ground ferociously. Robbie whacks him. Dumb dog. Mendoza throws up.

  In time, coming down, he rubbed off the pine needles that had pressed into his skin, and took his first square look at his Great Work of Art.

  Then, grimly, he took the canvas and smeared it, face down, across the ground.

  4

  LABOUR DAY WEEKEND, AND HE WAS SO HORNY THAT EVEN replays of Nadia Comaneci, performing perfect tens in her white-and-red striped gymnastics outfit, looked to him as concupiscent, as vulval, as Hans Bellmer’s ball-jointed pornographic doll. (A coffee-table book – a post-Freudian museological survey of erotic art that took in voodoo fetishes, African clitoridec-tomies, and the misogyny of Picasso – was the best he could sneak up to his bedroom that night in the absence of a copy of Bosom Buddies.)

  So the next day, the last Saturday of August, he split. He would have told someone, but at lunch time, when he came downstairs, no one was around to tell. So he just took off.

  He never felt more a part of his nothing generation than when he was alone; alone in a concert crowd, alone at the family dinner table, and especially alone with a beer on a hill by the highway. He walked with his thumb out, standing under overpasses spray-painted with seagulls, symbols of the international hitchhikers’ fraternity: a white one indicated a first-class spot, blue meant O
K, red meant you could wait for a ride till the cows came home.

  The cows were, in fact, preparing to come home when he finally scored a ride, as far as Châteauguay, three-quarters of the way. Tramping across the Champlain bridge, his feet aching and his socks crusted with dirt where his sneakers had broken open, he rejoiced to see Montreal’s skyline fencing the mountain, the brown air like bruised sky above it and, as he approached, the great cubes of glass breaking up the myriad reflections of new and old architectures like the images in the eye of a bluebottle fly.

  The city was still blindingly bright, packed with people, and hot as an oven. It was as if humidity had an arse and had squatted down right over Peel and Ste-Catherine. Cars flashed in the glare. The tar on the roads was soft. Office buildings exhaled their dry, dead breath onto the sidewalks through rumbling grills. He walked with his hair loose and his shirt flapping open, combing the people-streams hopelessly, foolishly, for Ivy, his heart lurching like that of a dumb lost beast whenever someone with her gait, her hair, her pale complexion bobbed up in the crowds.

  His tongue scooping psychedelic camel-dungy mushroom-slime from his teeth, now he’s on vulcanized feet, numbly bumping into people as they loom up stretched or squeezed, like versions of himself in a fun-house mirror. Catches blips of conversation in his sponge ears, bubbles of gummy telekinesis like the speech balloons that float around in cartoons. HEY! YOUNG MAN! YOU LOOK LIKE YOU’RE IN NEED OF SALVATION! Laughs at a sun – and meths-crazed rummy who’s stopped traffic, kneeling down in the middle of the street to worship a bus. Robbie’s bent on despising him until the pigs come along to infringe upon the stinky old guy’s liberties, at which point he asserts a sudden kinship by standing next to the cruiser; Robbie the civil watchdog, eyes as big as saucers, monitoring police brutalities.

  He buys a can of beer and stops in Dominion Square to play chess with old Joe Smolij, the rubby with the brambled beard and the SMASH CRASH GAMBIT sweatshirt, as blackened with street-grime and oil as the undercarriage of a diesel truck, who keeps up a running commentary above the din of traffic throughout games he never loses. “Make a moof make a moof,” Joe says, stamping a pawn onto his corrugated checkerboard and punching the stop-clock. “Time is money. Money is freedom. Oh oh oh no no – never expose your king, boy without a brain. Some patriot, some colonial, ha! You boss, but don’t feel bad. Nobody think fast in this heat.”

  “Wow.” Robbie stares at his paralyzed pieces, barely out of the gate, his beer can still cool between his thighs. Fool’s mate. Joe’s lungs are obviously custom-finished to process carbon monoxide to his brain. “Fuck.”

  Joe looks hard at Robbie, scratches a sunburnt potato of a nose. “I don’t make no boozy moofs. I don’t get angry so quick.”

  Robbie’s taken aback by the answer. He’s not angry with Joe. He thought he was enjoying himself. He forks out his dollar, smiling to prove it, says goodbye and strides on, loving the tickle of sweat at the back of his neck, running his fingers up his slick spine, rolling past soft rubber skyscrapers under a flexible sky. From University Avenue, where the highway deposits drivers downtown, he trucks westward to Atwater, where Canada’s first McDonald’s is pumping out its patented sweet greasy-meaty smell. And here, too, is the Forum, home of the Habs. Home of the Habs, yes, but more significantly, where the Bones played in the 120 degree heat for an hour and twenty-three magnificent minutes back in the summer of ’72: for blocks in all directions, the sashed and macraméd windows of apartments had been propped open with loudspeakers heralding the group’s arrival, the marquee featuring their name the way a church posts a Sunday sermon. Within, the stage was a dragon writhing in a bath of blood, Spit Swagger’s testicles dangling like a sack of tennis balls down one leg of his white, sequinned jumpsuit. The show was two hours late; rumour had it Keef had fainted backstage. From drugs, I imagine, Mom said. Yeah, Robbie said, saluting with clenched fist, from drugs. And when he got home, he discovered his sweat had dyed his thighs and penis a jeany blue. All this, by the way, was when Robbie was the Bones’ biggest fan, bar only Ivy. Now, of course, he hates Keef’s guts and for some very good reasons, reasons he brooded over most of the winter and is sick to death of now and does not want to discuss, thank you very much. He lopes on up Atwater past the great rock temple like a yellow-eyed wolf, into the heart of Westmount, to the park.

  But the park is quiet. The Kiosk’s still locked up for the summer. Bummer. He shoots himself in the temple, blam, then takes Plan B, which is buy a screwdriver from Pascal’s, go to the house, crawl unseen beneath the bushes, force the little dungeon window open, and once inside, have the place to himself. His bohemian love-pad. He’ll lead his friends in by the back door, past the sign Dad has posted that reads,

  ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE ABANDON DOPE

  straight down the back stairs to party till they puke.

  The window splinters from its casing with a loud crack. He kneels in the sweet humid earth and waits, his heart pounding loud in his ears. A strand of spider web clings to his lips. Rhododendron leaves reach under his shirt and clamp onto his damp back. He pulls the window back and slides head-first into the basement, bringing in with him a cascade of earth that fills his nose and mouth and scatters across the carpet.

  The dungeon’s cool darkness smells of mildew, stale beer, and African-musk incense. The moisture has warped his record jackets; mould is growing on the patches of carpet where friends puked the last time they’d parried there.

  Upstairs, the fridge reverberates on. Then switches off automatically, leaving the house in stillness again. Robbie with a heavy head stands in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, cleaning earth out from his nostrils with his thumbs.

  “Hello-o,” he calls up. “Is anybody ho-ome?”

  The old house swallows up the words. Settles on its foundations. Robbie becomes aware of its electrical nervous system, of its groaning arterial piping, like the sound Dad makes heaving himself onto the couch after a hefty meal. Felled by food, he hears Miriam say.

  In the living room, the television screen has accumulated dust. The rubber plants too. Three-month-old newspapers lie on the floor announcing political events that were of unbelievably small interest to him even then. He plinks on the piano, high notes only. Outdoors the cicadas send out their really weird buzz, like loudly amplified electric cables.

  He stands before one of the windows to the west, the stain in the glass fiercely illuminated by the setting sun – after Rossetti, a noblewoman in a flounced alizarin dress and the caption,

  Gather Ye Rosebuds

  He walks into the kitchen, and suddenly the hallway telephone rings. He reaches instinctively for the receiver. Then thinks better of it.

  On the kitchen counter by the fridge lie the leftovers of the family’s last hectic meal, a Pyrex dish filled with oily water, a skin of tiny bubbles clinging to its sides, and the outline of a baked eggplant in the bottom like a fossil from the Palaeozoic era. Above the stove a blackboard reads, in Mom’s handwriting,

  insoluble aluminum phosphate

  –indigestible to trees -

  Robbie picks up a piece of chalk and writes,

  S.P.E.C.T.R.E. was here

  On another wall, the kindergarten classics: Robbie’s own prize-winning watercolour abstracts, wonky houses and blobby animals. Chunkily signed. The runny, muddy paint and warped paper with curling corners, stuck there with crinkly scotch tape. Plus Miriam’s world-famous portrait of a man fresh out of the shower, a circus attraction to be sure, with a cock to do a horse proud dangling there in red crayon. And marked at the bottom, DADDY BEFOR AND AFTR. And all around him diagrams indicating articles of clothing to be worn. SHERT. RED SOX. PANTIES.

  Only girls wear panties, Robbie hears Barnabus say.

  Yeah, well, I wish we could take the stupid thing down now, Miriam snaps in his ear. I did it years ago and I’m thirteen now if you don’t mind. I find it really disgusting.

  The sun has set now, and plunged the house into throbbing darknes
s. He opens the fridge cautiously. A sliver of cold light cuts across the kitchen tiles. In the fridge, some concentrated tomato paste. He squeezes the tube and licks the end. Two Jerusalem artichokes. A jar of wheat germ. Some fine imported horseradish. Lard in wax paper. Blackstrap molasses. Yoghurt culture. He closes the door and mutters, “Fuck.” Then louder, “Food food everywhere and not a bite to eat.”

  Cops patrol Westmount regularly during cottage season, or so Dad has warned, so Robbie dares not switch on a light. He didn’t think of this when first entertaining his Bacchanalian fantasies for the weekend. Bummer. Sitting on the floor in the dark, he makes a furtive phone call, counting the holes in the dial with his fingers. His voice sounds flat in his ears.

  “Hi, can I speak to Ivy.”

  “No. I’m sorry. She is gone away.” Ivy’s Grendel mother. “Who is calling, if you please?”

  He hangs up. Immediately the phone rings again.

  “CHRISSAKE,” he shouts. “No one TRUSTS me around here.”

  He makes two more furtive calls, to Brat, to Louie, allowing four rings only, but no one answers. He sits down on the chair and listens to the last of the evening traffic. The silence closing in like pillows on his ears. He makes for the dungeon, holding on to walls. Lurks down there like Gollum in the damp, nostrils curling up at the mildew. Funny, how all winter long he lurked in this upset-stomach, steeped in bitter contentment, taking acid pleasures from his solitude, and now look: sunstruck and defeated, he lies down on a gutted beanbag chair and falls fitfully asleep, hugging the crunchy pillow and pretending Ivy is lying there beside him, breathing gently with her hand curled against her throat.

  Next morning he turned the living-room stereo up to full, yelling ALL PARENTS MUST DIE! He opened a tin of maple syrup and poured a bowl of stale Sugar Krunchie crumbs. Into that he mixed water and a generous drop of cherry leb hash oil. He read the blurbs on the box. There were FREE! plastic endangered species, offered both in French and English. How educational, he thought. Our bilingual culture.…