Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  A knock on the door. Robbie looked through the peephole and there, in the convex distortion of the lens, was Ivy in her swimsuit. He opened the door. She was dry, and in a fury.

  “You want to know what happened, I suppose. Well, I pushed the wrong door up there. I locked myself in the stairwell. I banged, but you never came. So I went down the stairs, fifteen flights, opened another door at the bottom, and I was right in the middle of the Bonaventure mall.”

  “You were right in the middle of the Bonaventure mall?” Robbie repeated incredulously. “Crack me up!”

  “God. It’s not a bit funny, you know. It’s still late-night shopping down there. People are bringing back all the stupid Christmas gifts they’ve had dumped on them by their relatives. The place is packed.”

  “Were you embarrassed?” Robbie said with a snorting laugh. “Even must’ve been.”

  “You know me. I walked through the crowd with my head up. Maybe people thought I was a promotional gimmick for a travel agency, I didn’t care. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is I was walking along and I bumped into the father.”

  “Fucksake!”

  “He was returning presents. His arms were full of them, he almost didn’t see me. Now he’s in the lobby settling our bill. I told you no good comes of giving Christmas presents. God.”

  Even if there had been time to flee, where would they have gone? So they packed their bags. Robbie fixed his glare at a reproachful heavenwards angle, his hot skull like a Trojan helmet with iron eyes. In the hall now, Ivy moved like a ghost – in the way he was accustomed to seeing her, only now he understood why – hugging walls, sliding from one place to the next as if she were afraid of being swatted. And just as she said, her father was there in the lobby as the elevator opened. He was winding his thumbs and looking like The Stuffed Toy from Hell. No doubt he was in a rage after discovering the amount of brandy they had ordered up on room service. Now he was marching towards them and, some ten feet away, raised his hand to strike. Robbie ducked instinctively, but it was Ivy Mr. Mills swatted.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Fun’s over.”

  “Later for that, man,” Robbie said, taking his most challenging stance: hands clasped casually behind his neck like this is a walk in the park, his dry gulch eyes flaring, and an arid smirk on his lips. “I say let’s rap.”

  “I say this better be good,” Mr. Mills replied. “You’ve got five minutes.”

  Back in the suffocating restaurant then, and a funky cocktail lounge act had hit the stage. The pantywaist musicians with their poodle haircuts were going at a repertoire of chart-toppers with the keener enthusiasm of boy scouts doing camp activities. Robbie was alert to the minutest change in the atmosphere, sensitive to the molecular vibrations in this dead place, to Ivy’s rapid breathing. He stood by the table, legs apart, one knee resonating madly, his hands where a holster might be, his neck cocked back. Mr. Mills sat down, elbows on the table like an opponent in an arm-wrestling match, and stabbed the tablecloth with a heavy index finger. Robbie obediently sat. Ivy sat too, and rolled a cigarette.

  “What’s this?” Mr. Mills demanded. “Has he started you smoking, too? Dear Lord, what have you done to my daughter?”

  “K, wait,” Robbie said, supersmooth. “Cool your jets. What exactly is eating you?”

  “What is eating me? What is eating me?” Mr. Mills was apoplectic. A waiter arrived. Mr. Mills ordered water, all around.

  “Will that be mineral water, sir? Perrier? With lemon? With lime?”

  “TAP water,” Mr. Mills snapped, and Robbie was amazed at how briskly the waiter turned on his heel and took off. He sought Ivy’s leg beneath the table, and rubbed their shins together. But Mr. Mills must have had his leg stretched out too, and that must have been the one Robbie was rubbing, because it abruptly withdrew.

  “STOP that!” Mr. Mills barked. He stood up and grabbed Ivy’s chair from behind, yanking it several feet back from the table with Ivy still on it. Ivy didn’t register one iota of surprise. She held on to the side of the chair for balance, that’s all. Then she crossed her legs, scrunched her hair, and reached to the table for her tobacco pouch.

  “What exactly is up your ass, man?” Robbie said, and he could hear his voice wobbling. “I mean, sorry. I’ll say that more politely – you seem about to have a heart attack. Why is that?”

  “Because I love my daughter. You kids don’t think up here,” pointing at his own head, “you think down there,” pointing at Ivy’s crotch. “My wife always told me about your kind. Taking advantage of French-Canadian girls.”

  Robbie knew exactly what Mr. Mills meant by your kind, because you never feel more Jewish than when you’re accused of being it. No one has to say the words – you just know. And since when did this guy ever listen to his wife? What a cheap shot, how obvious – Mr. Mills had to be only going for Jew because, for want of a nigger or a chink, Jew was the nearest available target. Like really, Robbie thought, what real reason was there to dislike a Jew more than anyone else? He suddenly found himself taking a stand against all prejudice everywhere in the world, because it is so cheap, and so promiscuous. However much Robbie would have liked to change that word Jew into something grander-sounding, like Mesopotamian or Atlantean or Carthaginian – something with a prouder architecture, with more than just one syllable, that you couldn’t just spit out – however embarrassed he was to catch himself unawares in the mirror and see that old melancholic, hunted look in his own eyes (wondering if, in Nazi Germany, he would have been pegged for a Jew as he boarded a train to escape the country), it still didn’t jibe with him to be pigeon-holed. So he said, “Hey, man, watch what you say, I’m Robbie Bookbinder.”

  “I know who you are,” Mr. Mills said. “You’re just an angry young man. And I know you’ve been corrupting my fifteen-year-old daughter.”

  Fifteen? Jeez. She always said she was seventeen. The waiter brought a tray, with three glasses, setting them down with laborious precision, one by one.

  “I told myself it was OK if she missed a curfew or two,” Mr. Mills said, at last. “I told myself, what’s a few beers. I told myself, they’ll break up soon enough without my help. My daughter isn’t stupid, I reassured myself. But I will not take any more now I know she’s on the pill.”

  “The pill?”

  “Don’t bullshit me, you little sneak,” Mr. Mills said. “You’ve got two more minutes to say your piece, then we’re gone.”

  Robbie looked at Ivy. She didn’t look up. She was concentrating – perversely, Robbie thought – on striking a match. “Ahh, how do you know she’s on the pill?” he ventured.

  “I don’t have to tell you.”

  “I wanna know, K.”

  “All right. I was borrowing her clock-radio. The cord was tangled under her bed.”

  “You call me a sneak,” Robbie exclaimed, and slapped his own forehead. “Look, man, we haven’t exactly made love yet, but to be honest we were planning it. And it wasn’t going to be in some sleazy dive or nothing. That’s why we came here. It was going to be, like, a celebration, really beautiful, with chocolates and-”

  “I don’t want to HEAR about it,” Mr. Mills shouted, pounding the table. The water and ice jumped from the glasses, and ashes were dashed from Ivy’s ashtray. People turned their heads.

  “Hey, man, hey!” Robbie said. “Is that how you bring up your kids, by punching ’em out?”

  “You’ll have kids one day, you’ll see.”

  “No way, José.”

  “You ought to be horsewhipped yourself. I’m going to your father to explain my methods in person.”

  “Good luck. Corporate punishment is against family policy, I’m afraid.” You can’t really take him seriously, Robbie thought, lancing him with a look. His chest ached. Whew! he thought, I’ve hated people before, but those hates were farts in the wind compared to this. “Haven’t you heard,” he said, “these are the seventies.”

  “That’s enough,” Mr. Mills shouted. “Ivy,
sweetheart, we’re going. And you – if you so much as dream of her again.…”

  He hauled Ivy out of her seat by one arm and dragged her out of the restaurant. Ivy didn’t resist; she expressed her indifference by fussing with her tobacco pouch. Lots of people were looking over now. He ignored them, pretending to enjoy the band. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop, tapped his foot, took a sip of water. And in the din inside his skull, he replayed the event, word for angry word, and wondered if there was anything he had said that you could really blame him for. And Mr. Mills would surely repent once he cooled down; the fat fuck would soon see that, unlike Robbie, he had let his dignity slip. It would all work out fine in the end.

  13

  MRS. GRISSOM HAD HIS NUMBER AND SHE LIKED TO USE IT. She had no consideration – at six in the morning or eleven-thirty at night, she had her bony finger primed to dial. And sometimes she phoned before Robbie’d even had a chance to put the record on. What, he wondered, was she standing on her dining-room table with her ear to the ceiling, monitoring his every approach to the turntable? He tossed in bed over the fact that the more useless people become in society, the more you’re supposed to respect them.

  The phone rang. Now it was Rosie on the line.

  “Hi!” she shouted in his ear above the din of the strip club. “I’m just calling to let you know how happy I am. REAL happy. I’m on my break, I have a little time, so – how about you tell me why you don’t love me, and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong!”

  Robbie had figured a phone of his own would allow him to gab with friends without getting razzed by family for once in his life, but he never expected it to be a liability. Unravelling the dusty mummy bandages of sleep after his slumber of centuries is difficult; his arms are bound by the sheets, he can hardly roll over, there are heavy pennies on his eyes.

  “Whatsamatter Bob, can’t you show me you miss me? I still have to work. I was getting frisky’n I was thinking I’m going back to astrological birth control – it’ll be less messy for you. Dr. Eugen Jonas says women have a SECOND fertility period called the cosmic period’n that occurs each time the sun and moon are in the same ANGULAR relation to each other as they were when the woman was born’n that’s every twenty-nine and a half days, like the lunar cycle.…”

  Robbie’s trying hard to rise from his sarcophagus, but his body is thick with muzzy embalming fluids. “I’m a Capricorn,” he manages. “Capricorns don’t believe in astrology.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that about Capricorns – oh, wait, wait. You shouldn’t make fun like that, Bob. I’m starting to believe you’re not the romantic I once saw you as. You’re too much in love with cold hard facts.”

  “Yeah, well,” Robbie retorted, “it’s better than you, clinging to the sixties like a burr on the pants of time.”

  “Oh, thanks a lot. Hey, Bob, are you with somebody?”

  “Rosie, quit getting jealous on me. You’re always – I can’t get a handle –”

  CLIK.

  And it dawns on him for the first time that she thinks they’re going out. Then he sinks back under, reassuring himself that, when next he sees her, she’ll be too sensitive to bring the matter up again.

  Three weeks before Xmas now, and he’d not paid a single month’s rent. The first month he hadn’t come up with a payment, Queenie Graves, the super, was unexpectedly sympathetic; she told him she remembered how difficult it was for her moving out the first time, being a single mother and all, and how she could only imagine the hard road a young artist must have to follow. At the other end of the dingy, narrow, cabbage-damp hallway, Robbie had caught sight of Mr. Graves, who drove trucks, Queenie said. He had upper arms the size of Holiday Season hams, standing sideways and looking over his shoulder, like a pitcher sizing up a batter from the mound. He wore a sleeveless, cheesecloth undershirt and elephant-ass pants and looked, from Robbie’s perspective, capable of knocking the teeth out of any tenant who didn’t pay the rent. Robbie suspected he might already have knocked a couple of Queenie’s teeth out; she wasn’t all that old – no more than thirty, he reckoned – but she already wore dentures, which she liked to click around with her tongue while she considered things.

  Thankfully, the time the Grissoms’ ceiling caved in Mr. Graves had been on the road, and Queenie had remained easy even then, saying how old the building was and how inevitable little accidents were. That’s how Robbie had the courage to report, cheque-less, at the end of November, assuring her, “For sure I’m a professional artist. Only last week I designed an exclusive pass card to that disco on Bishop – used to be a church – Gino’s Paradise – ever been?” Robbie rubbing his eyelid like mad. “But when I asked about my money they said if I bugged them again they’d break my legs. What could I do?”

  One grimy rugrat clung to Queenie’s leg, another – older, warier – watched from a distance. Queenie stood, planted in a quilted dressing-gown that must once have been a lively canary yellow, but was closer now to grapefruit rind in a garbage bag. She leaned against her doorway smiling easily, fixing him with bright blue eyes, casting all over his face for more information. Then she rolled them up to the ceiling like a flirtatious schoolgirl, producing dimples in her ruddy cheeks.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” she said, and smoothed her dressing-gown over her hips. “I don’t wanta go too hard on you, eh. No lectures, okay. I don’t think you should be forced t’stand here for too long and see me dressed not altogether at my best, you bein’ an artist and appreciatin’ beauty and that. F’you kin keep the front walk clear of snow and ice for the older folks in the building, you kin pay late this month and, who knows, we maybe kin come up with an arrangement. We’ll see.”

  Robbie gratefully agreed, and reached out to shake her hand. When she smiled her heavy wide lips slipped up her teeth like the husk pulled back from a cob of corn.

  “De ting dat crack me up de most, hostie,” Louie Louie told him, “is when de cock chase de hen. E chase and chase till e wear er hout. E got appy feet, e pull her on like a rubber boot. I get such a ardon to watch dat I can’t close my heyelid.”

  Robbie craned his neck back to look at the lofty ceiling of the slat-and-litter house. Hanging from the rafters were neon strips, whose jittery light cranked up the nervous atmosphere of several thousand chicks awaiting debeaking.

  “This your job, too?” Robbie said, pulling his T-shirt over his nose. “Shovelling out the doo doo?”

  Louie Louie told him chickens have such cast-iron stomachs they can eat their own waste, and human waste, too. The thrifty farmer who owned this place had housed the chicks near the workers’ can, and channelled a sluice over to enrich the mash that flowed past them on conveyor belts. Robbie had come with near-serious intentions, but he knew immediately that this was one more job that made not paying the rent look attractive.

  He sat while Louie Louie debeaked. It wasn’t just a joe job, Louie Louie pointed out proudly, it required precision and experience. If you didn’t do it right, either you risked cutting off the chick’s tiny tongue, or the beak grew right back again, and debeaking a chick that’s older than ten days is way more difficult. Robbie watched as Louie Louie positioned himself in front of the machine. The Louis Beaulieu held a chick with his thumb at the back of its head, and his forefinger under its throat. He squeezed its throat lightly, causing the chick’s tongue to pull back, and inserted the beak in a hole on the face of the machine. The beak hit a trigger, a hot blade dropped down and sliced it clean off.

  “It look cruel,” Louie Louie said, “mais faut le faire, t’sais, in crowded cage like dese, cause chicken are cannibal and are gonna peck each another raw, udderwise. Mos funny ting is,” he chortled as he picked up a squirming chick, “you’re not suppose to de-beak when dey’re hunder stress. Hunder stress, uff. Uff uff.”

  “Chrissake. How many do you do in a day, man?”

  “Two tousand an hour, maybe.”

  “Two thousand? Fuck. That’s your job?”

  “Halso. I clip d
e toes of de female. Just like Suzette, wit de salon, who I gave de great doggies. Uff uff. And I de-wing too, and I dub, which is cut off de comb of de pullet.”

  “Chrissake. What’s left of ’em when you’re done?”

  “Kentucky Fry Rat, mon chum. Uff. Uff uff.”

  Louie Louie treated Robbie to lunch in his cubbyhole – Pepsi, tourtière mini-pak, tarte au sucre, Mae West. From his locker, he handed back a book Robbie had lent him, an erotic classic Ivy had once lent Robbie: The Autobiography of a Flea, by Anonymous.

  “C’est-tu ben platte, cette affaire là,” he said. “Where de dirty part? Explique, hostie, ç’a pas d’sense.”

  “Let’s see,” Robbie said. “Thus she pumped from Clement a fourth discharge, and reeking in the excessive outpouring of a seminal fluid, as well as fatigued with the unusual duration of the pastime, she disappeared to contemplate at leisure the monstrous proportions and unusual capability of her gigantic confessor.”

  “Taberslaque! Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire?”

  “Fucked if I know. But it used to turn Ivy on, I’ll tell you that much for free.”

  “Now dis,” Louie Louie said, pointing to a Bosom Buddies calendar on the wall by his desk. “Dis hi unnerstan. Ayy, Robbie mon vieux, when you jerk off han de baby batter go in your navel, you hever dip your celery in dat?”

  Several midnights a week, Robbie skidded over downtown blocks of matte black ice to the Roxy, the streets flecked with hunched up figures, the massed steel-wool clouds foaming overhead. His ears as red-and-white as candy canes. His forehead a burning slab in the knife-edged wind, tears streaming from his eyes.

  Hell’s Yells’ practices were already drawing a crowd. Kids congregated at the foot of the fire escape; after the Roxy staff switched off the marquee lights, Louie Louie lowered the metal stairs and let them climb up. They occupied the first three rows, and watched the boys work out the kinks in their act.