All in a flurry, then: Ivy screaming, Gaston and his pals going Har har mon hostie, the close wail of a siren, Gaston shouting Les boeufs! and taking off across the ice. A policeman with cigar breath and a badged Cossack hat, strings hanging down from the ear muffs, closely examining Robbie’s predicament. Robbie feeling more shame than pain, Ivy on his other side saying I told you about those guys you should listen to me next time OK. I better go to Pendeli’s for some hot water. Robbie going elllh and swivelling his eyeballs like a poor dumb beast. He’s trying to gently peel his tongue from the pipe, but when he does there’s a sensation of deeply embedded needles. And in this winter night air his eyes are very blurry and warm with tears, which at least may melt this terrible ice.
That weekend she took him to her brother Olly’s place (the one not in jail, he guessed) on a brand-new development plot in Côte St.-Luc. It was still under construction, all trailers and gouged frozen earth, plywood skeletons and exposed insulation, unshingled walls wrapped with candy-stripe sheathing, each house resembling a child’s sketch of the perfect home, and you counted the fifth salted driveway on the crescent to identify Olly’s. As they got off the bus, Robbie brooded that Ivy hadn’t even asked how he felt.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, when at last she noticed his long face, “but why should I waste words? You’re obviously happy enough to see me. And you’ve been talking nonstop for the last half-hour, so your tongue’s obviously in working order. What else do you need from me?”
He shrugged and asked her what her brother did.
“Stuff.”
“What kind of stuff, exactly?”
“ – ”
“K, OK, I know. Ask you no questions you’ll tell me no lies.”
He’d never live in a suburban nightmare like this, not in a million years. When he got famous he’d buy a Tudor country estate like Keef’s. He’d read about it in Mom’s House and Garden: Addams Family style, with spiky trellises on the roof and a spidery weathervane, creepy tangled vegetation flourishing on the grounds, a real garden of delights: Venus flytraps, poison ivy, grotesque warty mushrooms, mammoth hollyhocks, mad Van Gogh sunflowers, and ferns as impenetrable as bales of barbed wire. If Robbie had a garden – not the trimmed rectangle the size of a bridge table that passed for a yard around here – he’d plant all those things too, plus install a moat with an alligator to take care of mailmen, and kids who’d thrown their frisbees wild.
“Oh, hey, don’t point that thing at guests!” Olly’s wife Karen said. “Cissy, I said put that gun down.” The two-year-old stood at the front door clutching a dull black pistol in her sticky fists. Robbie pulled a game smile, looked at her fat little legs, the ketchup and the crumbs on her face, the rubber diaper as swollen as a dinghy.
“You’re thinkin these kids have unusual hobbies, eh,” Karen said, smiling back apologetically. “Collectin Nazi memorabilia an nat?”
“No, no,” Robbie said, taking a chair, real casual, at the kitchen table. “Different strokes, right?”
There were two other children, one still an infant in a towering highchair, the other a five-year-old grabbing only at things Cissy had already picked up. And, oh look, Robbie’s Mom was on the television on the counter, turned up loud. She was doing a sunny story on disappearing vacation spots and the erosion of archaeological treasures by air pollution. Now there was a tug-of-war over the Luger. Karen bent down to separate the babies, and Robbie got a faceful of cellulite – the loose trunks of her thighs, squeezed into an old pair of denim cut-offs, favourites from a slimmer time – crossed with red striations where the seams had bitten in.
“Bendin down like this,” she said, “always makes me think about how the worst part of a prostitute’s job eh, apart from standin in the freezin rain, is bendin down to look in cars. They must have terrible bad backs, specially since they gotta stand fer hours on them stupid heels.”
“That’s not the worst part,” Robbie said, but the words came out more tersely than he had intended; he’d figured on starting a cordial conversation, but he now realized what a sour mood Ivy had put him in with her infuriating silences and evasions. And, Chrissake, what kind of psycho family was this? His whole body had stiffened with moral rectitude. “I mean, what about the job itself?”
“Aw, who is this guy, Ivy honey?” Karen said, patting Cissy’s diaper and wrinkling her nose.
… and did you know, Mom was saying, your hair dyes are tested on the eyes of rabbits? And how about the expression ‘mad as a hatter’ – hatters used to soften fur with mercury to make felt linings, but now it’s been documented that mercury poisoning will result in shrunken brain cells…
“Way I see it,” Robbie pronounced, taking a righteous slurp of beer, “if they’re not happy they should take a job at the Baron.” Mom was in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza now, and now Big Ben, and said G’bye World! Karen switched the TV off, and exchanged a glance with Ivy.
“OK, you guys, I’m just gonna change this little monster. Why doncha play pool if you want?” She laughed and looked dead at Robbie. “We got a real table, down in the den. Betcha get tired of just playing pocket pool, eh, Mr. Big Balls?”
Downstairs Ivy put on a Bones record and racked up, while Robbie snooped, his cheeks still burning. On a desk with a typewriter, The History of Firearms. He flipped through it idly. The typewriter, he noticed, sat on a placemat whose rubber bristles made up a Harley-Davidson logo. There were some cheap pool trophies on a shelf, and a heavier-duty one fashioned from a camshaft and mounted on a block of wood with a plaque.
“Oh. Your brother ride a bike?”
“If you say so,” Ivy said. “Your break.”
He inspected a photograph propped against the trophy. There was Karen, and a bunch of guys with heavy beards and filthy jean jackets and keychains and tattoos. Chrissake, Robbie thought. The real McCoy.
He broke, sewered the cue ball. Soon after that, as Ivy hunkered down to pocket her fourth ball in a row, he looked around some more, just to prove how losing didn’t faze him a bit. On one wall hung two Indonesian shadow puppets – two demons, it looked like – on another a Day-Glo poster of a groovy couple fucking against a cosmic backdrop, and on a third a Strolling Bones mirror featuring Keef Richards naked and nailed to a cross backwards, his spine pushing out the flesh like a row of spikes. Into the mirror’s frame was tucked a strip of photos from an automatic photo booth, and there was Spit Swagger grinning darkly and Karen crammed in on his lap, shirtless, braless by the third snap, and laughing by the fourth.
“Wow,” Robbie said. “Does Karen know Spit?”
“ – ”
A few feet away from the mirror was a coatstand. Hanging from it was a black shirt. A patch representing a hand of cards had been sewn on the shoulder. Robbie held the sleeve up to get a better look. Ivy put some wicked English on the cue ball. Five cards sprayed with bullet holes: pair of aces, pair of eights, and one joker skull. “Chrissake,” he said aloud. “Olly’s a Dead Man’s Hand, isn’t he?”
“Chrissake,” Ivy mimicked. “No, not at all. If you must know, he’s the president.”
“Wow,” Robbie said, gingerly feeling the sore tip of his tongue.
From behind the desk Ivy pulled out a heavy sheaf of papers, fatter than a phone book, bound in a blue file.
“Transcripts, lookit,” she whispered proudly. “This is every phone call made to and from this house for the last two years. Exhibit ‘A’. The RCMP says that after the Mafia and the Angels and the Outlaws, they’re the most powerful organized-crime group in the province. They know who Olly is, they’ve been trying to nail him forever, but he’s so incredibly clever nothing sticks. A couple of guys got some time, but not Olly. He’s respectable. He’s rich too: rule of the club is that his salary always matches what the prime minister makes.”
“But, like, I know all about bikers, right,” Robbie said.
“That must be nice for you,” Ivy said, stiffening.
“Yeah,” Rob
bie said. “Does he have a Filthy Few patch?”
“What, that says he’s killed for the club? Don’t be an idiot. The only thing like that he ever boasted about was the time the neighbour’s cat kept him up meowing all night. He told me he lured the cat in with a kipper, smashed its brains out with a hammer, put it in the deep freeze overnight, and put it back on the doorstep, paws up, with the neighbour’s morning paper in its mouth. Isn’t that incredible?”
Olly Mills arrived home. Robbie had expected him to be at the vanguard of a roaring metal horde, all spit and greasy hair and Nazi helmets, spewing salt and ice behind them, but looking up through the casement window he could see the wheels of a nice mustard Chevrolet pull up the driveway without so much as a squeal. Olly was taller and leaner than Robbie, his hair was shorter too, and he barely had a beer gut at all. He looked like a dentist, home from Sunday golf.
They sat around the kitchen table, the babies splashing on the floor in an inflatable Scoobie Doo wading pool. Olly was quiet and gracious and Ivy was more alert than Robbie had ever seen her. She asked questions, told him awful stories about school, fetched him beers, gave him a shoulder rub, and explained anything he wanted to know. Robbie sat there like a hairy gargoyle, despising her utterly, and trying to work up the courage to ask Olly if he knew Gaston Goupil and if, by any small chance, he could ask him to lay the fuck off. Olly picked Cissy up and dandled her on his knee, and Robbie thought of all the newspaper stories he had read about how bikers are the scum of the earth, gun runners, extortionists, hired killers, drug dealers, robbers, porn dealers, loan sharks, professional rapists, and lords of the white slave-trade, all in a day’s work. And here he was in the kitchen of Mr. and Mrs. Burb. What outrages had Robbie read about, and registered with a mixture of revulsion and awe? There was that story about a biker’s old lady in St. Jovite who wouldn’t participate in a gang bang, so her old man nailed her to a pine tree – she didn’t scream or even protest, and only went to hospital because the infections in her palms made it impossible to give hand jobs to customers. Then hadn’t three Aces and Eights been fished out of Lake Kilborn just last summer? Cops said it was a gang war because the bloated bodies had been wrapped in sleeping bags and anchored with chains and cinder blocks, which was the Hell’s Angels’ trademark.
An hour later, Robbie was shaking the hand of the president of the Dead Man’s Hands goodbye.
Ivy kissed her brother and said, “I left the batik for you in the living room. See you.”
As they slid around the icy crescent, Robbie was exploding with questions he knew Ivy would never answer. He tried one anyway. “Neat. Olly do batik too?”
“ – ”
They rode the bus home in silence.
9
LIKE DAD HAD WANTED HIM TO DO SO BAD AT THAT BUMMER of a Seder, Robbie buzzed off. He got out. He got way out – two damp nights on the Coke-skinned floor of the Roxy, and two more chilly ones sitting propped up inside the Westmount Kiosk, with the wind buffeting the wooden walls. Finally Rosie found him in Dominion Square, arguing noisily over a game of chess with Joe Smolij, and took him home for a hot bath – even old Joe, who smelled like a bowl of mouldy polewka, had flared his thistly nostrils when Robbie first put his dollar down. True to her word, meanwhile, she’d spoken to a friend who, luckily, had moved out of her apartment that Labour Day weekend, and needed a new tenant to sublet immediately.
“Sorry I didn’t get a better price for that Bones ticket,” Robbie said, by way of thanking her.
“S’OK, Bob,” she replied, kissing him. “I know what it’s like sometimes, not to see the woods for the trees.”
“Mn-hm,” he said doubtfully, hoping that by this sylvan metaphor she did not mean the better aspects of herself. He thought of a Chinese fortune cookie he’d once read: woman’s heart like hotel – room for everyone, and that was more like Rosie; her heart was as big as the Holiday Inn at Niagara Falls – way too big for him, too indiscriminately accommodating, with DOUBLE ROOMS AT CUT-RATE PRICES! – not his style at all. In fact he felt kind of sorry for her. K, it was nice that she was helping him out, just this once, but she’d have to realize that since he was on his own now it would be unhealthy for him to lean on his friends too much; put more plainly, she’d just have to stop glomming onto him.
That had been a week ago. Now this cool September morning in the neutral light of dawn, the walls of his mouth numb with bourbon, the stuff of his brain swollen up, he had the experience of swimming over rooftops. Having drunk himself sober and stayed up long enough to overcome fatigue, he was staring out the bedroom window of his new apartment on Berdnikoff Avenue, through its membrane of pale dirt, thinking. Feeling. In jags. The only colour out on the street was a crackling neon billboard displaying the latest in Eccelucci’s famous line of sensuous lingerie. The street was deserted here, under the eastern bluffs of the mountain. Clouds scudded over his new neighbourhood with its spiked iron fences and dusty doilied windowsills and dark apartments. On the sidewalk, a tricycle lay abandoned on its side, its frame wet with morning dew, a piece of bedraggled string trailing from its handlebars. Like a newborn baby bike.
Robbie had the second floor of four, accessed by a winding staircase with curlicued iron railings. Similar staircases braced similar buildings all down the street, some twisted and some straight, each one with a skin of cracking green paint, as thick as bark. Across the road he could see the windows of other apartment hollows, each with a blue fluttering TV heart, and through the floor Mom was giving the third degree to some industrialist about miscarriages and stillbirths. The mist had shrouded downtown, leaving only the broken teeth of the city. The rain-streaked concrete bunkers they call apartment buildings squatted cinder-grey at intervals, as if this was all that was left after the apocalypse: Montreal reduced to a stone garden, eerily quiet, its population evaporated, people’s phantom shadows printed on the walls and sidewalks, cars welded to the roads.
Rosie was crashed on his mattress, Brat on the floor wearing sunglasses with a crumpled cigarette behind one ear. Louie Louie had already crawled off to the poultry factory, holding his head and complaining of a shrunken skull. What a night. Robbie could only remember it in one big bundle: the jammed toilet at Arthur’s Hideaway stinking of urine. Mirror’s gone, smashed long ago, nothing but a shiny steel plate on the wall now. Him peering in. His anamorphous reflection, the real him: his metal soul. People are shoving in line for a turn at the urinals, scribbling, leaning over, comparing notes. The concrete graffitied walls. GO HOME LES MAUDITS BLOKES. He’s suffering from a bashful bladder – the pepsi goon squad’s threatening to squash his incredible shrinking penis against the cold and slimy porcelain, and all he wants is a private, unpolitical pee, thank you very much. Standing there thinking of waterfalls. Complicated mathematical equations. Anything. Hopeless, he’s terrible at math. It’s hypotenuseless. Faking a shiver, turns around aching and ashamed. Happily spies a vacant cubicle just then. Inside he leans with one foot braced back against the lockless door. Balanced on the other foot aiming as best he can. Wad of bloody tissue swells in the bowl. His own piss sounds like rain on a cardboard box. Pops a Quaalude and starts to count his money from an envelope. Amazing: one thousand clams. His kicker for this new life, tax free, all in cash. Plus a note, in Mom’s handwriting: Lots of luck, darling. Don’t spend it all in one place. When she handed him the envelope and Dad shook his hand, he’d wanted to say, No thanks, I’ll manage. But he didn’t, so here it is. A flushing from the Ladies on the other side of the wall draws the water in his toilet down a little, and now the tissue looks like a jellyfish with its network of pulsing transparent arteries. He tries to stuff back all the bills, but a flyer slips out and twirls into the toilet. Fuck it, proclaims Robbie the Rich spitting royal spit, kicking the flush handle with his sneaker. Rolls back up the stairs bandy-legged, like a squid in warm water. This is the life, wallowing in the buzz of guitars like skiffs skipping on choppy whiteheads, fish with aluminum wings, seagulls with jet engines,
electric veils of seaspray on the breeze. At the bar a jagged redhead sits alone, stirring her drink with a long fingernail. Robbie leans up against that amazing bleeping new video game called Pong – you bounce a little square blip (the tennis ball) off a little rectangular blip (the racquet), and welcome to the twentieth century! Pulls out his envelope. Robbie the Mighty, laden with booty, having pillaged, ready now to play Pong. The redhead’s hair is lacquered into antennae, her tile-red leather gear layered like armour. A boiled but living lobster. He imagines her naked, skinny and pale, ochre freckles all over her flesh. Exoskeletal ribs and rust-coloured pubic hair, sharp as razor blades. Heels on her feet that would slide out of her boots like the flesh in a crustacean’s claws. Their eyes meet now. Her expression: complete and utter disdain. Robbie shrugs and returns to his friends at a battered round table. Buys everyone a brew, winning many pledges of allegiance. The big buzz at the court is re: their old men. Brat’s is stinking rich, he owns Lovely Enterprises. Louie Louie, tabernouche, is papa as retire an watch de hockey an de game show all de days. ? tink Louie’s a failure, but, calice, e’ll be surprise. Rosie’s Daddy wishes he could have his daughter back, the one with the long blonde hair who used to read Cosmo, not this vampire queen, this utter stranger who comes home only to feed and fight. Just shows to go ya, she says, home is where the hurt is. Lovely Enterprises meanwhile distribute plastic squeezers for toothpaste tubes and sno-globe paperweights and portraits of clowns on velvet. Hey, someone’s got to do it. Lovely Tunes for the perfect office environment. Lovely sentimental memory cards and posters. Lovely bargain-basement makeup. Lovely kiddie party loot bags, whoopie cushions, X-ray Spex, and square egg-makers. Soon the human race will expire, the cities will erode and rust down, leaving only Lovely Enterprises’ non-biodegradable empire. Alien archaeologists will sift through mountains of the Lovely plastic shit and have one bizarre time reconstructing this society, fuck. Ferocious chainsaw music thunders over the PA, sending strong alternating currents underground – the figures on the dance floor are tattered rats leaping about in an electrified cage. Robbie goes to the pool table, the felt blotched with booze and blood. A clutch of biker mamas, bitchin splits, are shooting a game. He lays a sawbuck on the table, grabbing a tipless cue like a lance. No one picks up the gauntlet. They play in a grim, defiant silence, stabbing at the cue ball with authority, cigarette smoke crawling up their cheeks, eyelids convulsing in squints, thorny-rose bumblebee death’s head chained-flesh tattoos slipping out from under their clothes as they bend over. Ignoring him completely. No matter: later, how much later he can’t remember, they’re all leaning against the scratched and greasy aluminum counter of the Baron Bulgingburger at St-Laurent and Ste-Catherine. At his grand invitation. The lobster lady too, a dozen other people he doesn’t know. The oily hair. The animal hunger. Dogs and burgs spitting on the grill. His bladder full of hot beer. Cops and rockers in line for coffees. There’s a rubby with a split head and dried, ketchup-caked hair lined up beside a stunning transvestite in a Louise Brooks coiffe and a lamé tube dress, and the whole banquet’s on Robbie. Chin on fists, now, watching with disdain the guy in the mustard – and relish-coloured Baron outfit as the poor bastard struggles with the order. Drop of sweat falling slow-mo from the guy’s forehead onto a sizzling burger and Robbie thinks, Not if it was the last job on Earth. Louie goes, Un penis, all-dress hOK, avec cum, blood, coodies, de works. Rosie snapping If that little wiener reminds you of your dick I hope you have a lot of technique to make up for it. Laughing, spluttering spittle onto the counter, Robbie goes, Turdburger pour moi, two order of spark plug. Brat howling, drumming flippers on the counter. Louie Louie doubled over, headbanging and screaming. Chose là, ah ouais, un JAVEX. Deux PENIS, un RINGWORM all-DRESS UFF UFF UFF. And the guy in the Baron Bulgingburger outfit announces nonchalantly into the microphone: trois penis deux turd all-dress deux spark plug deux javex un ringworm. Weird fucken night. Later still, at Robbie’s new place, everyone drinks his beer smashing bottles against the radiator playing records at crusher volumes. All except the Bones’ Greatest Shits, which gets tossed about his new apartment like a frisbee. And then nailed to a wall. What else. Clumps of hair, smell of glue. Rosie’s face laughing close up, silver bubblegum tumbling about on her tongue like a pinball. She’s cut Robbie’s hair and dyed it purple and glued it up like porcupine quills. A punkupint. Shaves his eyebrows too, at a sinister aquiline angle, an eagle’s wings plunging. Then bites him on the neck. He likes her, and could spend more time with her, if only she could make some serious adjustments to her personality. Because her idea of what makes a person interesting is all wrong: Remember, Bob, when we met, you were with Ivy and I was completely nude! Now the room’s thick with people and smoke, hot and sulphurous as a matchbox crammed with fresh-burnt matches, and Robbie, knowing he’s being an asshole, stuffs a twenty dollar bill into her bra and drifts away across an ocean of nervous ecstasy, buoyed up by the idea that this is his place, all this noise is bouncing off his walls and making his ceiling tremble. Then realizing it’s almost midnight and he’s not been tucked in yet. Chest heaving whoa! over a wave of worry: without his mother will he ever manage to take care of himself? A cigarette butt he’s swallowed with his beer is floating like a raft on an incredible journey through his digestive system. The subterranean garden of guts. The squeezing fleshy tunnels. The acid baths. Placing the frostie like a cold snub-nosed pistol to his forehead he crawls to put a record on. On his knees before the stereo set he has an ecstatic vision of himself with Hell’s Yells, swinging his arms in an arena somewhere in the American Midwest, lights searing, stage like a raft on pitching water, guitars howling, and his own heart amplified like a big bass drum. The crowd throws up a bristling undersea garden of hands in murky poppling water, He Him Himself in the eye of this musical hurricane dressed like a killer ballerina, like a blood-stained peacock, like Poseidon on angel dust. But thinking, Mom and Dad would not be impressed. Oh, but this is silly, darling. Little Robbie like a raw deboned chicken suddenly, emasculated and wishing he could do it like Keef – mindlessly, meaninglessly, with total abandon. Convulsive or not at all – plunging through a massive pane of glass in outer space, plunging through it with knees tucked into the chest, head-first with the glass splinters slicing past the ears like shooting stars and heels like exhaust pipes. The image fast as a blink. Silly, really, but leaving no time for respectability or conscience or pigs or disappointed parents or anything. If Hell’s Yells aren’t abandoned they won’t be worth shit. What’re you going to sing about then? Rosie asks. How about the environment, like your Mom. Acid snow. Sizzling springtime, and robins dropping out of the sky. Robbie barks, I don’t give a FUCK about the environment, and feels his hardened hair pointing like horns up above. He lives downtown now; there is no environment downtown. Vibrating like a rattlesnake he’s finally shuffled off his tender family skin. He doesn’t need anyone any more. Sucking on the nozzle of a glass water-pipe, gagging on the acrid yellow smoke. Holding it down with a wet snap of his nasal passage. Exhaling and passing the bong to Louie Louie. And now Brat has thrown up in the toilet. A spectacular topographical map of his delinquent evening that sits like a loose soufflé on the seat which in his haste – his arms are too short – he has neglected to lift. Against the tiled floor, a grin crawls across his white face like a wet centipede. Technicolour yawn, man. Robbie meanwhile is trying to concentrate, please: Hell’s Yells will be terminally dinful, he announces, toxic waste for city ears, a wall of shattered sound, white noise, urban congestion, a soundtrack of trashcans and traffic. Rosie says, It’s easier to describe ugliness than beauty. All this silly rage! And you can’t even play an instrument! Seething, Robbie tells her that’s irrelevant, all the beauty in the world has already been described, and technique is passé – you need only kick the instruments screaming around the stage. By the way, Rosie, did you upchuck too? For Rosie smells of vomit. No, Bob, I cleaned up Brat’s barf for him. If you object, I can try and put it all back where I found it
. She turns her back for him to rub since as she says he has no other instruments to play. Robbie standing on the brink. A bridge of nerve endings sagging between him and her. Maybe he does love – no, he’s only confusing it with gratitude. The roof of the world is descending now, its old air heavy as wax in his ears. Oh, for heaven’s sake, she says, taking his hands and placing them on her shoulders. You don’t have to look like I’ve sentenced you to death. I’m not really in love with you, don’t be frightened. I’m in like, that’s all. Robbie staring at the back of her head, his fingers have no muscles at all. Which is when he has his inspiration. Makes his stomach spin to think of it, but he’s grinning too. Here he goes. It’s all or nothing; he must go for broke, he sees. Spend every penny his parents gave him. How else will he ever be sure to do his own thing?
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