Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  Robbie swayed at a thirty-degree angle off his chair and made a face of slack-jawed, loose-lidded superciliousness, hyulk hyulk. He’s not feeling a fucking thing, never will again. What’s the point, the world’s already gone to the dogs as it is, what does it need one more fucked-up perspective anyway?

  Many more beers, and several bourbons later, off they went at last to become the world famous Hell’s Yells. When the Roxy emptied out, the boys hauled their mountain of amps onto the stage in front of the screen, and the projectionist projected movies all over them without the sound. It was the best light show you could imagine – 2001: A Space Odyssey; Night of the Living Dead; The Rocky Horror Picture Show; Robbie drunk as a skunk, staggering around, while Brat kicked his guitar screaming across the empty auditorium, and Louie Louie hammered his head with a mike. Robbie feels nothing but his stomach reaching hungrily up his raw bourbon-marinated throat. He’s stripped off his shirt to become a fleshpad of moving tattoos. He expands his rib cage and stretches his arms out and opens his ears as big as ravenous mouths to guzzle this amazing noise down, till he’s full to the brim. In this ocean of sloshing colour his body is numb, transparent, odourless to him, but he can watch the map of his neon guts flash and slither like the sign outside a pinball parlour – the bile route in electric blue one second, lip-gloss red the next, the sluices of booze and pills in cloudy white, his seething bloodstream a bolted gunmetal grey. When that snail-paced spaceship in 2001 goes by, he imagines himself plunging through a massive glass pane in the black and outer ether; plunging through it with his knees tucked into his chest, head first with the glass splinters slicing past his ears like shooting stars. He throws himself on the floor, again and again, heels pointing backwards like exhaust pipes behind him. He fires whole chambers of dum-dum bullets into his brain, and hollers in tongues like a born-again lunatic. The pigs and their little enquiries, fuck ’em. Bang. Old people, authorities, good health, fuck it all. Bang. The future the past my lungs my heart my nerves, fuck ’em. Bang. And Ivy, Ivy Mills, FUCK HER. BANG. He blasts and reels and thrashes and lunges about. His knees and the palms of his hands scrape and bruise and bleed, but he just can’t feel; in those blinks of jagged time, with the bourbon and the black beauties and the heat of his rage as his nuclear fuel, there’s no time for reason or respectability or conscience or disappointed adults. He’s doing it mindlessly, meaninglessly, convulsively, like a biker on acid, like an embattled knight, blind and deaf and sweating bullets inside his helmet. Like Keef, he’s abandoning himself, at long last, to his own thing.

  12

  IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT HE WAS HAVING THE WORST TIME of his life with her, it always struck him, when he stole a glance, how simply beautiful Ivy was, with that leaping polecat nose of hers and that tussock of bracken-brown hair. His chest swelled up with a shout of joy. He had to clamp his jaw shut. Suppressed, the shout dissolved like intoxicating bubbles throughout his flesh, causing his limbs to tingle, and leaving him weak with anticipation.

  Baimy Goldfarb’s Holiday Season party, and Robbie knew how everyone would envy him for owning such a beauty. But Ivy chose an armchair that sat only one, and he was forced to kneel at her feet like an obedient puppy.

  “Let’s play the game,” she said, “where we invent characters and meet again for the first time.”

  So, Robbie thought sadly, it wasn’t good enough any more for them to be just Robbie and Ivy. He shrugged, and watched as she retreated still further from him.

  “Hi there, guy.” Silky Ivy, like she’s done this before. “You know anyone here?”

  “No way, I don’t know nobody, hostie,” Robbie said, putting heavy inflections on the words, pepsi-style: Hi don know no-boddee. He’d do his best to play. He’d be Gaston. Just to check.

  “Gotta light, man?” Ivy held out a joint. “Boring fucken party or what?”

  Chrissake, he thought, who’s she being? She’s so excited she’s just about got goose bumps.

  “Ayy, tabernacle, it might develop.” Tabarnac, hit might developp. He watched her beadily, and there was no doubt: she was aroused. Her lips were swollen like the lobes of a Red Delicious apple, a dimple in the middle where moments ago the stem had attached it to the branch of the tree. Her eyelids drifted drowsily down, like leaves in a humid orchard. She put the joint in her mouth and drew it out to wet the rolling paper. Then she did the same to Robbie’s index finger. He could smell her saliva, rich, like mulched earth.

  Trying now to make conversation, but nothing comes, and she just sits there looking like death warmed-over. Occasionally, she blows her bangs off her forehead. He’s searching, really riffling through his mind for something, anything to say. It’s an incredible sensation, being utterly blank like this. And being stoned makes him hyperaware of being utterly blank. Well, maybe this is what it’s really like to be Gaston, arf arf. He finishes his beer, fuel for thought, maybe. But it’s like the Earth has stopped spinning, and every subject that ever existed has flown off the face of the planet.

  He goes to the fridge for fresh beers, where Brat says in his ear, “She’s not overly cute, but – coochie coochie coo.”

  And Robbie snaps back, “Don’t razz me, man. That’s not what our thing’s about. I don’t give two shits if she’s cute.”

  Brat takes Robbie upstairs to meet his grandmother. She’s sitting alone in her room, knitting. There’s so much wool in her lap, and she’s so round and compact and fleecy, Robbie has the impression that she’s knitting herself. She looks up, and listens to Brat with applied concentration, nodding after every word and looking at Robbie like he were the Eighth Wonder of the World. Robbie smiles a lot. His face hurts doing it.

  “She’s deaf as a coot,” Brat says.

  “Are you behaving yourselves?” the old lady says.

  “NICE AS PIE, GRANDMOTHER,” Brat shouts.

  Downstairs, the party has taken off. Several couples are making out on the couch, several ashtrays have coughed up their contents on the carpet, and someone has knocked over the Chanukah bush. Robbie goes to the stereo, rudely lifts some fucking disco piece of shit off the turntable, and puts on the Bones instead. From across the room, Ivy makes a grave face and thumbs up, and begins to bob her head determinedly. He sits down again and strokes her shin. With fresh hope, he goes, “I would like join de club of your brudder.”

  Ivy looks at him for several beats, her head still bobbing. She looks really stupid, Robbie thinks, much too intense. Then she says, “God. You’re a complete and total idiot, you know that? Ever since we fucked, up against the playground wall, I’ve wanted to kill myself. L’enfer c’est les autres, do you understand dat?”

  “Sure,” Robbie says, shaken, unsure if she’s talking to him or to Gaston. Is that what they did, fuck against the playground wall? Or is she just testing him? He should have thought of that, and now he’s in too deep. His nervous system feels like it’s short-circuiting, burning his flesh from the inside. “Right. Dat bad, huh? I shoulda tought of dat.”

  “No, you shouldn’t, Robbie. You think too much, that’s your problem. Don’t dream it. Be it. That’s existentialism. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Yeah.” He’s lost his grip on his character completely now. “I know what you mean. It’s like sometimes I feel like smashing things. I want to throw things around the room, but I’m, I…”

  While he searches for the right words, Ivy lifts her beer bottle over her head and whips it clear across the room at a glass-front cabinet filled with chinaware. The crash brings even Brat’s grandmother, fretting, to the top of the stairs. The whole party stands around the shattered glass and froth on the carpet, silently, and then turns to Ivy and Robbie. Ivy’s tugging at her hair, making fleabitten ears, and grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

  “Time to disappear,” she says, sweeps up her overcoat and flies out of the house.

  Robbie lingers. He’s worried that people will think they’re breaking up. Grandma Goldfarb is hysterical. She shrieks and beats at him
with her cane and drives him out the front door.

  Outside it’s quiet, way below zero. Under the late-night crushed-ice sky, Ivy’s on her back in the snow with her winter clothes scattered all around. A broken column of breath rises from her mouth. She’s laughing so hard she’s barely making a sound. When she notices Robbie standing there, she claps her red, mittenless hands and scoops snow up at him and manages, “And I bet you were terribly worried what everyone in there thought, too!”

  Robbie forces a laugh and sits on top of her and beats her up playfully. She resists ferociously, shoves his nose with the butt of her palm.

  “Oww! Hey,” he cries. “We’re being convulsive now – right?”

  “Not at all. Or at least, I’m glad I don’t have to spell it out for you. Now, will you please get off of me.”

  Charcoal on his fingers, he spent most afternoons the week preceding Xmas holidays sketching Ivy in the attic. He had heaps of studies of her now, in all her moods – Ivy looking distant, Ivy being moody, Ivy brooding, Ivy being morose, Ivy guarding a secret, Ivy with an abstract thought, Ivy saturated with liquor and longing, Ivy doing her batik, absolutely nude.

  He asked her if she was addicted to smack. She said, “God, no. You know me.”

  “Ha! That’s what everybody…”

  Ivy’s response to that was to look up from her batik, and gaze through the window with a flinch of irritation. Then, just as he expected her to dunk the canting into the molten wax and bend over the cloth again, she sighed and said, “God. What makes people dangerous addicts is not having stuff around to chip. I have all I want. Only problem I get is, well, constipation. Real bad, you have no idea. The other day I had to pull the log out with my fingers.”

  As for joining her, meanwhile – forget it. He was paranoid of needles to begin with, but he also considered himself a real smart head, a most discerning individual, to never even smoke the hard stuff or skinpop it or anything stupid like that. K, to explain: some stones are cool, ’cause the drugs will do the thinking for you in times of stress, of which there are many during the teens; you don’t always feel too clever – in fact sometimes you feel dumb as a dog – but at least when you’re stoned, the blues zip by like lightning. Time is your friend, for once. Anyway, here are some of the drugs he figured a person can handle in moderation: Maryjane, obviously, kif too, honey oil, all that. Bennies of any variety (blackbirds, cartwheels, cranks, dexies, greenies, jelly babies, lid-poppers, pink amps, green amps, crystal meth, you name it). What else – snappers, gunk, stinkweed. All the kitchen conveniences: catnip, mellow yellow, wild lettuce, kola nuts, nutmeg, parsley, fennel, dill. And the stuff in the cabinet; paregoric and Valium and Demerol. What else? Yellow jackets, Christmas trees, goofers, Mexican reds, red devils, rainbows, Seconal. Canary Island broom, sweet flag, calea, California poppies, camphor, betel nuts. Jeez, what else: wedgies – you know, flats of various kinds like sunshine, pearly gates, blue cheer, windowpane, strawberry fields, purple microdot. Then all the alphabet: MDA, STP, PCP, DMT, MBD, DOM. Ummm. Mesc, ludes, mandrakes, quacks, laughing gas, peyote, passionflower, percs, magic mushrooms. Most of that, if you’re sensible, like Robbie, and don’t overdo it and don’t mix too many of them together at once or with booze or nothing, is cool. Go ahead, he’d say, try ’em all. You’re only young once.

  But Robbie did have a bottom line of KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN items: death’s head, because, well, the name speaks for itself. Ahh… what else? It was a very short list. Hard to think. Belladonna, that’s pretty dumb, unless you want to look like the Bride of Frankenstein with a wicked hangover. Black Henbane. Spanish fly, but that doesn’t do nothing, anyways. Cocaine’s too expensive, so he’ll cross that bridge when he gets to it. Opium, well, you almost never see it. Except when you know Ivy. And if you do and you do it, your stomach feels like the bottom of a bird cage saturated in fermented parrot droppings. And top of the list, the numero uno no-no, is junk. Who can really handle it, except Keef Richards, and he regularly flushes his blood out at a Swiss clinic and never had to hang out on the Main at Ste-Catherine at midnight to score some horse that you just know is going to be cut with baby laxative. Why bother? Everybody knows it’ll drag you down. Just look at Ivy, fuck.

  “We-ell,” she said in an amused drawl, her nose to the cloth, when he expressed his concern, “it shouldn’t come as such a surprise to you. How else could a person find the concentration to do all this detail? Heh, heh.”

  Robbie discovered that, when she was stoned like this, she was kinder to him, and more wistful. “Java,” she’d say. “Can’t you just picture it?” Robbie would look up and see her smiling to herself, meticulously trailing beads of wax on the coloured cloth. A long silence. The wintry wind buffeting the windows. The concentrated silence of classrooms below, punctuated occasionally by the shout of an irate teacher. The spinning and spitting of tires on the snow-choked streets. Robbie contentedly sketching. Then she’d murmur along some more.

  “Olly said one day he’ll let me go. It’d be warm and humid. We’d just wear these cotton sarongs or something. And hike to the ocean when we felt like it. Mellow, breezy, you know? Maybe we’d eat spicy goat stew, with bamboo hearts, and tea. And the purple mountains all around. God. Can’t you just picture it? You would have your head shaved with just a plait at the back. Me, too. I could also be a boy, just about. I’d wear a Bones T-shirt.…”

  Now, when he said kinder, Robbie didn’t really mean kind at all, since kindness requires some conscious effort, and he had come to the conclusion that Ivy was barely conscious at all, at least not of him. This was confirmed the morning he presented his Xmas gift to her: the last week of school, the cold slush had soaked through the shankless soles of his boots, and he was under a cloud; if there was one thing he hated more than studying, it was sports. He was nowhere near good enough a skater to make the school hockey team, so he was forced to play with the misfits, the leftovers and the losers. Worst of all were the chill showers, plus the smells of sweat and steam and mouldy towels and rotting wood, which he had hated and feared since he was six: boys with bellies and thighs as red and thick as boiled hams, blotchy bums. Shoving and shouting. Robbie self-conscious about being circumcised, shivering in a corner. He’d hide his underwear behind a radiator, so no one would steal it in the changing room. Then, when he pulled it out, it’d be matted with dust and spiderwebs.

  Ivy hated gymnastics class equally, so they fucksed together, and sat in Pendeli’s.

  “The whole school thing’s a joke,” Robbie said, “I’ve decided doing well isn’t so much to do with studying as using your head.”

  “That’s a perilous rationalization from someone like you,” Ivy said.

  “Right, sure. Ahh, look, I’d like to give you a present.”

  “Over my dead body. What for?”

  “Christmas of course! And because I, I…”

  “No. Don’t even think of saying it.”

  Here’s what he gave her: a new pair of gloves with the fingertips snipped so she could read at bus stops, and an anthology of Albert Camel’s poetry.

  “I had to sell some of my records,” he told her proudly.

  Ivy held the book at arm’s length, turned it over doubtfully. “Who’s Albert Camel?”

  “One of your favourite writers,” Robbie answered with a trace of irritation in his voice, for he was starting to suspect that she hadn’t bought him a thing in return. “You’ve said so a hundred times. He wrote a book about a plague, you said.”

  Ivy gave him a condescending look. “That’s Albert Camus. Thanks, anyway. Oh, hey. Look, I can see it in your face. That’s exactly the sort of pain I try to avoid at Christmas by not buying presents for anyone. You can never please people. And if you do like what you’ve been given, you can’t be sure what the person’s motive was in giving it to you. I don’t have to prove my affection for you by giving you a gift. I could give you a gift and not mean it.”

  Robbie shrugged unhappily. “You mean, if I didn�
��t give you a gift, you would have been happier?”

  “No, but I think you would have. Anyway, don’t worry. It’s not worth me explaining.”

  “I’d like you to explain, so I can understand.”

  “If I have to explain it, then you wouldn’t understand it.”

  “K, then,” Robbie said, and made a scrunched-up, resentful mouth. “Sorry.” But he wasn’t. His spirits had sunk to an all-time low. Why was it, he wondered, that when you’re with the person you love, you can so rarely manage even the simplest things? On his own, he had inspired conversations with her all the time, but those flights of giddy fancy always eluded him in real life; the rehearsed hilarity, the solemnity, and the moments of special intimate fusing never took place. And here he was again, severed from all natural experience, void of wit and energy. He barely recognized himself. She’d probably leave him now, and who could blame her? He pulled back his ears, felt the skin stretching over his face, widening his eyes like fleshy satellite dishes to pick up clues. Some distant signal of love. And only now he saw how the pupils in her eyes were constricted. And how her skin was pallid and damp. That was all he needed to know. And only now, he knew how much he hated her.

  Xmas Day, and Robbie was elbow-to-elbow with her bizarro family, having a hard time dealing with what a privileged middle-class kid he was. He was casting his eyes around and going, These are poor people.

  He hated himself for thinking it, on this day of all days, but the words came up involuntarily: What a pathetic meal. Is this all?

  The thing is, he’d never eaten in a poor family’s home before. Well, once before, when he was about eleven: a friend of a friend, at a pickup hockey game on Staynor Street, had taken him home for a Mae West and a Dr. Pepper and a TV dinner, and while they were watching Dark Shadows on a snowy UHS channel, the friend’s baby sister had hauled a foot-long tapeworm out of her throat, like a translucent linguine, right there on the carpet.