“No, no, I don’t,” he said quickly, guiltily. “It’s just, I have killer allergies this time of year – the annual Hay Fever Festival goes on until the first frost, fuck. So I need my mouth to breathe – mind if we don’t kiss?”
“OK, Bob,” she said, “so now let’s work out if I’m safe. I release one egg each menstrual cycle, right, ’n my egg has only twelve to twenty-four hours to be fertilized. OK. So under favourable cervical-mucus conditions, your sperm can survive four or five days, tops, inside my uterus and fallopian tubes, so – I’m actually fertile about eight to ten days.” Rosie counting it out on her fingers, squinting at the ceiling. “But lemme see, I finished my period only one, two… six days ago, so OK, hi ho Silver!”
Rosie had already introduced him to her bodily signs several weeks earlier – because, she said, the man’s not sexually sharing unless he participates in the contraceptive process. K, thought Robbie at the time, but he didn’t know this was her idea of foreplay – that she couldn’t ever get aroused without reaffirming her personal femininity like a proud gardener in a greenhouse bursting with hothouse tomatoes.
He watched her gel and insert the diaphragm. Then he, he himself, shook the bottle and filled the applicator with stinging contraceptive foam and gently – gently, Bob! – injected it into her vagina. After that, she tore open the little square package and he extracted the cold wet lambskin. He held it in the air like a biological specimen for several minutes, while she coaxed him back up, and made a game Smiley face as she rolled the chilly squiggly thing down.
Eventually they were humping. Robbie pushed her head back in the pillow to bite her on the neck. Trusting this to be an expression of tenderness, she gasped and sent her legs up into the air with her toes fanned out. And Robbie, hating himself, thought, Where’s Ivy. She’s betraying me, and probably in a much smarter way than this; sitting up in bed in Sumatra, in a silk kimono with a dragon on the back. Sipping jasmine tea. Anyway, she’s definitely not puffing or panting or slapping her belly against whoever or perspiring in the pits of her arms or making her delicate passage sore in frantic search of that elusive friend the orgasm. No, she’s having a convulsive conversation. “Don’t stop,” Rosie said hotly in his ear. “Just a little more, sweet Bob.” Robbie picturing Kiki Van Garterbelt in her most wanton Bosom Buddies centrefolds. Finally Rosie shuddered and grabbed, several times, going off like a string of firecrackers thrown into the street on Chinese New Year, and gasped, “Lions 1- Christians 3. Mmmn.”
After she’d gone, he surveyed the place, which he’d not exactly found time to clean up since he moved in a month ago: black broken record shrapnel lay everywhere, still; butts were strewn all over like spent cartridges; a pizza was on the turntable, the spindle neatly piercing a piece of pepperoni; a black bra hung from the handle of the Cocaine machine; and the black issue of an aerosol can’s aluminum bladder was all over the walls and ceiling.
He started by picking up a few empty stubbies, but the odour of their dregs echoed the residue in his own gullet, and he lay down feeling nauseous, the mouths of six bottles stuck to his fingertips, three on each hand, like electric milkers clamped to the teats of two cows. The room swirled around. The noise-pollution machines sat stacked silently in the hall and in every room. Robbie looked at them and wondered if he’d not been rash. A stink of gasoline blew in from over the rear of the Parthenon Fil-U-Up, where an enormous tanker was nursing the pumps now, like a great smelly pregnant iron pig. He closed the window, got himself a fresh beer, a therapeutic brew, and told himself it was time to get serious, to do something of importance.
Hell’s Yells. Brat and Louie Louie had not been impressed with the concept, so he’d just have to paint some inspirational images for them, in the same way stained-glass windows once told religious stories to illiterates. He’d design costumes, a stage set, record jackets, T-shirts. He’d get specific, write down lyrics, liner notes, souvenir program notes, a philosophy. And he knew that, just as urine was once used to make the golden glass glow, he’d have to pour the whole of himself into his work. Convulsive, or not at all.
No table, so he sat on the floor. He stirred a cup of tea with a pencil and chewed on the wood. Here he goes, he’s free, he can think of anything he wants, anything in the world. This is a historic occasion, a big day, the first of the rest of his life. Life will be what he makes it. He’ll prove himself now. He sat. Chewed the pencil. Got up for another beer. Sat down again.
K, seriously now…
The apartment was chilly; a faint smell of gas emanated from the kitchen. Periodically the radiators made a sound: tank. The window was a carapace of grime, the pale October light diffused through it dirtily. He sat, cozy in a luxurious Italian cardigan Mom had given him several Xmases ago. He picked at a cuticle, and noticed how the night’s drinking had caused his fingers to swell up around his nails. He caught a whiff of Rosie’s violent vagina on the tips. He drifted off, thinking about her cervical-mucus conditions…
Snapping back to attention now. Getting up and cracking open a fresh brew. Blank sheets lay on the carpet in front of him. His eraser stood up fresh and pink. He pulled a fresh pencil straight from the box. And sharpened it. No wastepaper basket either, so the shavings dropped onto the carpet. He ground them in with his knuckles. The radiator went tank. He pressed the lead to the paper.
Hell’s Yells. To start: their outfits.
He chewed that ragged cuticle some more, and now blood crept under the fingernail. He went for a Band-Aid.
On the way to the bathroom, he noticed an article on an open page of Blow Up magazine, a thoughtful piece about French Canadians’ passionate response to the Strolling Bones. Which he got to reading. Apparently, the sight of Keef with his arms outstretched, and Bile with his whip, and Spit Swagger at his electric organ (resembling an illuminated cathedral, in the writer’s opinion) provided a significant benediction for pepsi fans who, in spite of the way they aggressively ignored their Catholic heritage, unconsciously desired it.
Robbie wondered what the writer would say about Hell’s Yells. He plugged in one of his rented guitars and gave it a strangle. He made a lot of noise, but found himself quickly frustrated by the effort it took to make noise with any kind of significance. The effort left him feeling defeated, his fingertips smarting, his stomach craving lunch, and Mrs. Grissom thumping on her newly plastered ceiling with a broom.
Fish fingers for lunch, a knucklebone of ice in each one, warmed-up ketchup with grated parmesan on top. Plus another beer. Then he sat down again, pencil poised. He wasn’t going to let himself get bogged down, just because his attempt that morning at imagining outfits had been a pathetic failure; he’d simply put outfits aside for the moment and move on to stage design. He cranked a new record up extra-loud, to concentrate.
The phone was ringing. He had barely heard it above the din.
It was Mrs. Grissom. She sounded quite hysterical. “Whatsamatter with you, dammit? You deaf or somethin?”
“No, dammit,” Robbie replied calmly. “But if you are you old cow I can turn it up for you.”
He’d really been too well brought up to speak so rudely, but he did it anyway; for a start, he’d heard her swear way worse, round the corner at Wu’s grocery – she seemed to have that condition where people haul bags full of newspaper, and swear non-stop in the street – and he reasoned that this way, at least, he was speaking a language she understood. Then he hung up on her.
He couldn’t seem to get started. Frankly, he had thought that working here, alone in his brand new apartment, would be way easier. For one thing, he had not expected the sounds of the radiators to bug him so much. He guessed their tanking sound was made by the metal expanding and contracting as they heated and cooled. So he tried walloping them with a frying pan to settle the excited molecules. That worked. But not for long, and it painfully jarred the bones in his hand. He found that with a pair of pliers he could twist a valve at the base of the radiators, which let a rush of hot oily air out,
and that made them go quiet for a little longer. Manipulating the pliers was a tricky operation, however; he pinched his fingers so badly he got black bloody marks in his flesh. Bummer. Then he had trouble twisting one valve closed again, and the rush of hot oily air became a jet of hot oily water, that spattered all over the carpet and the wall. Major bummer. He went back to the more cathartic solution: throwing the frying pan right across the room as soon as a rad made the slightest tink. The eighth time, or the ninth, he hurled it with all his might, and the pan glanced right off the rad, smashed through his front window, and landed with a clang on the street below. Seething, he patched the damage over with garbage bags and a great stretch of Scotch tape. And sat down again.
Smoke break. The piece of hash he had was as big as a golf ball. Soon the carpet before him was scattered with burnt matches, SUCCESS WITHOUT COLLEGE matchbooks, cigarette ash, flakes of tobacco, the fluff of torn-out filters, Bambù rolling papers, little copper screens, and smudgy pellets of hash. And the radiator going tank. He emptied out a Ship matchbox, broke off one end of its tray, and slid it back in so the box was open at one end; he poked a hole in the top of the box, inserted the joint, lit it, and sucked in the smoke from the open end of the box. Tell the truth, he’s not overly keen about this method – when you put your lips to the box, you taste the sulphur from the match-strike panel – but it does make for a good strong toke and saves you in the end from burning your fingers on the roach. Go ahead, he thinks (the afternoon is wasting away, he’s starting to feel dreadfully self-conscious, as if the ghosts of his own self-reproach are finding substance in the smoky air), try it sometime.
So anyhow: Hell’s Yells’ stage set.
Yes, a stage set…
… he’s been picking his nose for a while now, rooting around in there like a robbing hobbit, and he wonders what to do with the mucilagenous specimens – the dragon Snot’s treasure – which he’s collected on the tips of both index fingers. He has his hands poised like a doctor awaiting rubber gloves. He wonders how long has he been up there, deep in the nose…
Gets up and goes to the bathroom for more toilet paper. Pulls at the roll a little harder than he intended (he’s pretty woozy now, he admits) and yards of the stuff, the cheap kind that sheds white fibres, unfurl onto the floor. Chrissake, what does it take? If your ambition in life is to be a bum-wad manufacturer, how much work does it take to get it right? You make the stuff soft, K, you make it strong so it doesn’t shed, and you perforate it properly so the pieces come off without tearing down the middle and dragging the rest of the roll onto the floor. K? What in hell else have you got to occupy your day? Can you really say you’re proud of your life? He catches his reflection in the mirror and glares at himself.
“Dopey,” he says, aloud. “Numbskull.”
And slaps his forehead. A wave of anxiety like a hot mist sweeps through his mind, condensing on the surface of his skin. He knows it. Almost three and he hasn’t drawn a thing all day. His palms are damp. He’s frightened and dizzy. And he’s broke. The apartment is quiet. Except for the tanking of the radiator. And the gas leaking from the stove smells like sweet burning vinyl. He gets a fresh beer, puts on a record and sits down again to really apply himself. Holds a Bosom Buddies magazine on his lap. He’s going to draw a vicious caricature of Keef Richards. He’ll illustrate the emptiness of the guy’s life by piecing his face together in a trompe l’oeil of naked women. This will be Hell’s Yells’ first album cover.
Casually leafing. Hello, here’s one of Robbie’s favourite actresses, Kiki Van Garterbelt, having a nude pillow fight with some co-eds in the dorm of a Canadian university. She might serve OK as a model for his cartoon. Though he’d prefer something less lewd – here her knees are off opposite edges of the page…
There aren’t any less lewd. That’s what he concludes after fifteen minutes, or maybe more. Of stroking the bishop. De bishop, as Louie Louie would call it. The gronker’s voice comes to him like that. Shaking ands wit your wife’s best friend. Aving a talk wit Mudder Fist and er five children, uff uff.
Masturbate. The real word feels unclean: the long word, the long wrinkled word, with a personal odour to it. That you rub up and down. He stops, looks around, ashamed. He should be working. At Collège Blanchemains, M. Nul. once told the class that some ancient Egyptian cults believed the moment of Creation was experienced in the ecstacy of divine masturbation. Robbie pictured the stars in the night sky then, and particularly the Milky Way, as this spray of sacred sperm. Then he caught Gaston Goupil’s grin and one-fisted gesture, and grinned despite himself. And they had both got detentions.
These magazines creep up on him, infect him, cause him to stew in his own juices. The afternoon light has faded, the streetlamps are already switching on in chains, and from the electric billboard on Park Avenue, the crackling neon colours of Eccelucci’s latest line of lingerie casts pastel shadows through the windows of the apartment. Brat, by the way, boasts that he never humps his fist, ’cause he can’t reach, but that if he could, he wouldn’t feel guilty because he’s Jewish and proud of it. Jews are cool, Robbie hears him hold forth belligerently at the Toe Blake Tavern, I read the holy books. I been to shul. The rabbis of old said it was OK, as far as onanism, eh – they recommended that a man of whom his wife has a bun in the oven – and I quote, I believe, Eliezer – ‘thresh inside and winnow outside.’ Louie Louie goes, Et ça veut dire quoi, hostie? Brat replies, It means that the man may beat his meat, even in the presence of the baby.
Switching on the light to pull himself together. These quicksand pictures. And the next thing Robbie knows, he’s reading the letters. Though he’s wise to them. He knows they’re not real. You can tell because certain coincidences in the language always crop up, if you read closely. For instance, here are three supposedly different guys, all proud possessors of eleven-inch so-called joysticks, who each describe the object of their lust as a dripping honeypot. Now do you know one single person in real life who calls a vagina a honeypot, or a penis a joystick? So three in one magazine is just too much.
Another beer and he turns to a page of ads with men sporting elephantine joysticks and endorsing Special Spurious Sex Pills. He’s not taken in by these, either – he knows spurious means not genuine, because Brat once told him that when a mailorder customer tried to sue Lovely Things Inc. over the failure of their Spectacular Spurious IQ Increasers, the company’s attorney successfully argued that the customer ought to have used a dictionary before ordering them – and Robbie feels sorry for all the ignorant men in North America who will be similarly disappointed after they receive the Special Spurious Sex Pills in an unmarked brown paper package, thinking that spurious means something between spurt and furious, and expecting to suddenly possess copious ejaculatory powers.
He turns a heavy glossy page. EASY LAYS, he reads, HOW TO SPOT THEM: Some are shy, some need a little warming up, others simply require cab fare. Interesting. And Robbie wonders, is there really such a thing as nympho housewives? And monopede mania – do some men really have a fetish for women’s leg-stumps? More ads now, promising books and films available only in the U.S. The plot summaries revolve around partners with mammoth members and esurient appetites for swallowing, it seems, just about anything. Photos too: sex zombies, contortionists – Kiki Van in a special appearance! – with ink screens printed over their genitals. Robbie supposes this is to protect the reader from a sight he may not relish, and understandably so. Black bars conceal the men’s joysticks; black dots disguise the women’s honeypots. Problem is, the obfuscations have incited his imagination all the more, and now he’s seized with a desire to own these books or films. Immediately. But there’s nothing quite so explicit available anywhere in Montreal, so far as he knows, and it will take three weeks if he sends off in the mail for one. He’ll have to draw something explicit for himself.…
Sitting with his pencil hovering above the fresh white paper. His groin hot and tumid. And the phone rings again.
It’s Barnabu
s on the line, sounding worried.
“Rob?”
“Yes. Hi, Barnabus. Bad timing.”
“But I’ve got a stomach ache. I got sent home from school. ’Cause I can’t go to the toilet.”
“That’s just constipation, Barn. Eat a banana.”
“It’s not that. I don’t want to. It’s… I saw something bad on TV. On Mom’s show.”
“What did you see?”
“About all the poolution in the world.”
“Pollution, you nit.”
“No, it’s poolution, I know. I’m afraid to poolute the planet Earth.”
“Oh boy, Barn, is no one taking care of you there?”
“Mom’s away. Dad’s asleep. And Miriam hates me. Will you come over and play?”
“Sorry, Barn. I’m way too busy. Go watch TV.”
“But that’s what everyone says,” Barnabus whines in his ear. “Please?”
“Look, I really gotta go. Sorry. K?”
“K… Bye.”
So, anyway: the trick here is to infuse each stroke of the pencil with a special sexy feeling. The fusing of his artistic skill with his figgy lust will produce something new: an image to make you go sticky, no matter what your sexual inclination. Just as Robbie feels it as he draws it, so’ll you feel it as you follow the lines with your eyes. He plans a wild priapic scene, a hot fantasia with horny lickerish satyrs and fleshy nymphs bound with garlands of flowers. The satyrs will dance around, wielding their organs like giant soft cabers, great huggable totem poles with heaps of pubic hair as thick as dewy moss. With a flick of watery gouache here, and a dollop of creamy impasto there, he’ll make the very paper writhe in pleasure. He’ll swish and dribble the paint so that even on an abstract level, or upside-down maybe, the picture will reveal itself to be one great climax, all marigold sperm and carnelian bollocks and wet wet carnation cunts. An arousing inflorescence. An aphrodisiac painting.
Kicking Tomorrow Page 16