Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  If you could call it that. For an act requires some planned co-ordination between performers, plus some articulated sense of purpose. Robbie hadn’t wanted to rehearse at all – he believed that spontaneity, uncertainty, and violent instability were the keys to their success. It irritated him that Brat and Louie Louie were so stuck on conventional concepts of music, like playing together. More than anything, he told them, Hell’s Yells demanded stamina. Hell’s Yells was a protest against blind tradition and pointless subtlety and pretentious technique. There should be no lyrics to learn, no songs as such, nothing you could call a rhythm – only a furnace blast of heat and energy, gunning from point A to point B, a music to end all musics, a meltdown of music-less particles, a riot of negative ions, anti-music.

  He roared and leapt and raged and mooned the crowd, but when all they did was sit lisdessly, watching, and not taking part, he had to figure he wasn’t giving enough. He attacked the front row and sat on the lap of a fan and pulled her shirt up to bare her breasts, and when her boyfriend just laughed and didn’t try to stop him, he knew he really wasn’t giving enough. He whipped an empty bottle at their heads, and when a barrage of litter didn’t come hurding back out of the darkness, he shouted “No fucken IDOLS,” and shot himself in the head with an aerosol spray can. “Don’t believe a word I say!” Black paint streaming from his ear, he yanked them out of their seats and wrote, one letter per cushion,

  NO IDOLS!

  and when all they did was cheer him on, he knew there was still a lot of work to be done.

  One advantage of having the Roxy for a practice space was that the band could fuel itself with junk food; Brat broke open the office door with a credit card, and there Robbie found the key to the candy counter. Night after night they gorged themselves on chocolate bars and cold popcorn and flat pop, crashing at dawn to sleep off the rawest stomachs. Problem was, Robbie soon developed a bad case of diarrhea, and found he’d have to supplement his diet in some way. His parents had given him a heap of tinned supplies when he first set out, but that had been exhausted in no time, and he was amazed at how quickly food can become a person’s paramount concern; world domination by Hell’s Yells was going to take a little while longer, he could face up to that, but he needed food now. At home he made stewy tea and re-used his teabags. He boiled spaghetti and ate it without butter or oil. And he mooched like mad: Monday night, Louie Louie’s for a feast of processed meat and cheese-food product, layered between damp slabs of white bread; Tuesday night, Rosie came over and did her best to impress him with a desiccated slice of veal, topped with withered onion shreds and gluey corn niblets drowned in maple syrup; Wednesday night, he went with her to L’Enfer Strip and got free beers; Thursday the same; Friday night he got shit-faced again and did a whole lot of her diet pills and repeated a joke he had heard from a bloody-minded Dublin punk group that was climbing the charts at the time: What’s an Irish seven-course meal? A potato and a six-pack of Guinness, arf arf; Saturday night he was back at the club; and on Sunday night, Brat’s mother fed him his only nourishment for the week: vegetarian chili, unchafed wheat bread on the side, pineapple juice, and bran cakes with boysenberry cream, which sent him farting happily home.

  Hunger makes a person keen. His senses became sharpened, his judgement quicker, his vision polished; no mirror above the aisle of Wu’s grocery store was convex enough to reflect him, none of Mr. Wu’s sons were fast enough to catch him. That was also because he was fuelled with benzedrine. Crackling like a spark plug, eyes in the back of his head. He was bristling, with eyes like rearview mirrors on a Vespa, and a good mod one, as anyone knows, has more mirrors on it than arms on a head-shop Shiva. He wore his mod parka – it had so many handy giant pockets it was like a green canvas kitchenette. Meat here, in flat frozen slabs; thin packets there, of Jell-O, soup-in-a-mug, chocolate, diet pills.

  Brat showed him some Dine ’n’ Dash scams, one of which went like this: they order two souvlakis all-dressed, K, two doner kebabs with spicy sauce, two gyros, and four Molson. Under the seat, in a footprint of iced sludge, Brat surreptitiously drops a wallet – a real cheap plastic one, courtesy of Lovely Things Inc. – with Mounties on it. It’s stuffed with old bus transfers and a couple of dollars conspicuously sticking out. After they scarf their meal, Robbie makes a big deal about having found this wallet on the floor. He asks some good folks at the adjacent booth if it’s theirs. At first they look fearfully at him – he’s all hammer-and-nails – but he’s very very nice and says, “Well, I’m going to return this at the cash, eh, but there’s only a couple of dollars in it, which they might think is – I mean, who carries just a couple of dollars, in a nice wallet like this, and take a look at me, it’s not as if I’m always trusted! So, when I tell the cashier about it, would you just wave to say I’m telling the truth? Oh, thank you. You’re very kind.” Then Robbie and Brat go to the cash and point to the nice folks and say to the cashier, “We found this wallet. And see those people there, they’re paying for us, OK?” Go ahead. Try it sometime.

  “FULL SCAM AHEAD!” Brat said, as they snowplowed up the street. “Oh, and by the way, I’ve got something for you.” From his jacket, he pulled a rolled-up T-shirt, black with white lettering on it. He unfurled it. Robbie stamped and blew breath into the bowl of his hands and, sucking the tang of onions from the walls of his cheeks, read,

  TO THE PIGS:

  AM I UNDER ARREST?

  NO? THEN POLITELY LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE

  YES? OK, I‘LL IDENTIFY MYSELF FULLY

  BUT I DEMAND MY RIGHT TO CONTACT A LAWYER

  IMMEDIATELY

  “Cool, eh? I got it done specially for you at my Dad’s factory. He says he likes it so much he’ll put out a line of Lovely T-Shirts with messages about social injustice on them. I had another idea, too, a novelty, eh – tin cans that’ll supposedly contain authentic FRESH AIR from the Canadian Rockies. Pay off is, he’s gonna make me director of the division next year. Anyway, you better wear it, man. I can’t always bail you out when you get in trouble.”

  That night Robbie went to L’Enfer Strip again, mainly to bum burgers and brews, but also because he always sort of hoped Ivy would show. Or at least it was only a matter of time before Olly turned up, and when he did, Robbie would screw up his courage and ask him.

  At the adjacent table, three black guys in pinstripe suits the colour of chocolate milk were taking in a gloomy dancer on their table top. “Yeah, BABY! Show us some TRIM! Give us some fair-haired PUSSY PIE!” The dancer, Florida-tanned, was listlessly thrusting her white bottom at the guys’ faces. They resembled dogs sniffing. Robbie watched her face and, with a lurch in his stomach, saw her lips were horribly swollen, as if she had been drinking boiling water.

  He visited the cramped dressing room, where Rosie allowed him to sit against the wall at the back. She was pulling on a black-lace clerical collar she’d made to match her brassiere. Robbie sat, feeling supercool with his spiky hair, shredded black bondage pants, Lovely T-shirt with the sleeves torn off, and studded dog collar like Mendoza used to wear.

  “Hi’m not so sure e should be ere,” said gloomy Dolores. She was stark naked but for a cigarette in her mouth and stilettoes on her feet. She wore her eyeliner like rings under a raccoon’s eyes, which made her look woebegone; she also had a way of facing the floor when she sucked on her cigarette, and looking up at the same time, half submissively and half suspiciously.

  “S’OK Dolores,” Rosie said. “He’s quiet and gentle.”

  “Quais, dat’s de kind dat worry me de mos,” Dolores said. “De ones who can’t look you in de face.” Making a glum and sarcastic moue at Robbie, who looked down. He dug his fingers into his plate oí pontine and slouched, doing all he could to feign nonchalance, as Dolores cupped her startlingly white breasts in her hands to glue a gold star on each nipple.

  After she’d left the room, Rosie said, “I saw you stare, Bob, but don’t go getting a crush on her. She’s not your type. She’s not happy, she’s doomed to
be one of those victims of society, some people just are. Like Little Miss You-Know-Who. I’ll tell you how bitter Dolores is – she got herpes on her lip from a guy, right, one of the Dead Man’s Hands, so what she does now is, if anyone in the club is being an animal, she kisses the lips of the beer bottles before she serves them. Gross, eh, but in a way I don’t blame her; I mean, we’re talking rapism and gynocide. We’re fighting in the trenches, anything goes. It’s like, OK you guys, your two thousand years are UP!”

  Robbie reached forward to give her shoulder a friendly squeeze, but when she purred and held his hand fast for an extended back rub, he was suddenly put off. Why did she have to behave so needily? It was irritating. Always the tense shoulders – for what reason, he wondered angrily, considering the easy life she led? This had become a duty, not a pleasure. His arms itched unpleasantly. He withdrew. Picked up a book from the counter, opened it, and frowned. Wimmyn In Herstory, two thirds of it underlined in pencil.

  “What’s all this, Rosie?”

  “So I can go back to the interesting bits, of course.”

  “But –” He leafed through. Page after page, entire passages, paragraphs, pages, meticulously underlined.

  “Oh, forget it,” she said, “you wouldn’t understand.”

  She fussed with her lacy push-up bra, her nipples erect, he slyly noticed, served up now like a couple of juicy plums. She caught his gaze in the mirror. “Cos it’s cold in here, in case you haven’t noticed. Silicone’s bad enough in wintertime, but OUCH do my boobs ever HURT when I’m about to have my period.”

  “Boobs,” Robbie said, by way of apology. Trying out consideration like an ill-fitting pair of pants. “Ugly word. Makes them sound like – I dunno – mistakes.”

  “Sometimes I think they are,” she replied mournfully, and got up to go take her clothes off all over again.

  “Ladies and GENNELmen, once again please welcome veuillez réclamer de loverly la CHARmante…”

  Rosie had added a kink to her striptease: in between articles of clothing, now she read passages from the Bible into a microphone – Classics of Misogyny, as she introduced them: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men,” she intoned gravely, pulling down a stocking from under her frock. “She is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor I Timothy 2: 10-14.”

  In Robbie’s humble opinion, this was a bit much. Well, it was boring. Who in their right mind comes to a strip club for Bible class? Rosie tossed a frilly garter belt to the front of the stage and read, “As the Church is subject to Christ, so let wives be subject in everything to their husbands. Ephesians 5: 23-24.”

  A man in a grey raincoat stood up, blocking Robbie’s view. He seemed to be whispering to Rosie, for she was leaning towards him over the lip of the stage. What was he doing, slipping money into her panties? Maybe not. For now Rosie had her distressed face on, apparently looking around for help. Then the man in the raincoat grabbed her shoulders, and nearly pulled her off the stage, lappets flapping. The music was loud, but you could hear her shriek. Several bouncers rushed over, grabbed the man, roughly and efficiently, and ushered him out of the club.

  Slouched in the rear of the club under the placard of rules, with his belly full of greaseburgers, poutine, and seven-odd beers, Robbie takes it all in. Interesting. No one pesters him to buy overpriced beers here – he’s been on nodding terms with the bouncers since Rosie cleared him. From this perspective, he can eyeball a dozen girls at one time, not unlike the women in those old paintings featuring harems or hell or catastrophes befalling all of mankind. He pictures them bound and helpless, some being ravished by Romans, others devoured by monsters. He thinks, my harem. Yeah. Weren’t there famous French painters who did tender portraits of the whores in Paris? One day he’ll bring a sketch pad in here, too. He could easily be famous too, if he just got around to it.

  After Chastity Church is done, Robbie, Cruel Lord of the Concubines, drunkenly reclines to watch an overweight stripper do her aerobic number: dimples in her buttocks, boobs just one more fold of flesh above her belly as she bends to disentangle her panties from a heel. She’s performing ludicrously unerotic contortions; touches her toes with her arse presented to the tiny crowd like a pummelled face, clumsily does the splits and lands with a bump, lies on her back like a stranded beetle and grabs her ankles, all with the enthusiasm of a beast at the circus. And Robbie despises her for it.…

  Sometime later, Rosie’s at his side. He looks at her blurrily. Her underwear’s stuffed with paper money, like a costume at a Caribbean carnival. Her temples and upper lip are glistening, her eyes gently searching his.

  “Robbie, are you all right? You look OUT of it. Boy, did you catch that weirdo? Know what he gave me? A pamphlet, look –JESUS LOVES EVERYBODY. He said I was a fornicator and a blasphemer. Well, at least SOMEone’s taking me seriously! Oh, and guess what, we’re taking care of Dolores tonight. Did I tell you she recently had a baby but she gave it away? Last week her old man threatened to eat it or something. I would of taken it off her, eh, but the adoption people said I wasn’t any more suitable a mother than she was. What’re they looking for anyway, the Virgin Mary?”

  On Ste-Catherine the three of them walk with their heads down against the wind, the butt of Dolores’ cigarette flaring brilliantly in the gusts. Rosie wraps one half of her fur coat around Robbie’s shoulders and tries to button the front around the both of them. Robbie shrugs her off roughly, and goes to pee against a wall. After he’s shivered and turned around he sees he’s attracted quite a crowd. What, have people never seen spiky purple hair, or what? Feeling reckless and mean, and knowing he looks like he’s stuck his cock in an electric socket, he jabs the middle finger of one hand at them and makes the other hand into a livid codpiece.

  “Chrisse,” Dolores says, grimacing against the wind. “Soon as I make henough money – pas compliqué, chus partie en Floride.” And singing that old Charlebois number, “Sur Québec Air, Transworld, Northern, Eastern, Western – pi Pan American.”

  Two blocks on, something moves in an alley. Just as Robbie notices him, he steps forward with a groan, his raincoat flapping like a raven’s wings.

  “Blasphemer! Fornicator!”

  Rosie jumps, grabs Robbie’s arm again, and grips it tight.

  “Oh ayy, bisse mon cul,” Dolores spits.

  “Yeah,” Rosie says. “Get outta my life, you weirdo.”

  “Prostitute!” the man hisses.

  “Weirdo!” Rosie says. “Captain of the Raincoat Brigade!”

  “Jesus loves everybody!” Robbie calls out merrily (he’s bobbing and weaving around, above it all somehow, witnessing the whole scene as if through a glass-bottomed boat), and pulls the girls down the street on his arms.

  “Devil’s gateway! Demons suck your body! How easily you destroyed man, the image of God!”

  They scoot away, turn a corner, until the rasping’s out of earshot. “Weirdo,” Rosie says, and shivers vigorously.

  By the time they arrived home, Robbie hopping from car roof to roof (enjoying the percussive pop they made when he jumped off), it was past three, but Mrs. Grissom had her face pressed to the glass of her front room, forehead and cheeks illuminated in the lamplight. She rapped on the glass and shook her fist and shouted. They heard locks unbolting as they approached. She wrenched the door open, and winked darkly.

  “You’re quite a hit with the ladies,” she said. “Ain’t you.”

  Rosie and Dolores shrieked with laughter, but Robbie wasn’t so amused – he was noticing the garbage bags he’d taken out earlier that day had been slashed. It couldn’t have been an animal, because other people’s bags were untouched, while junk-mail envelopes with his address clearly marked on them had slipped into the muddy snow; and to his dismay, the colourful, lurid, incriminating pages of several Bosom Buddies magazines. While Rosie and Dolores climbed the stairs, he gathered the messy bunch of tits and bums i
n soggy wrinkled wads, and rammed them into a trashcan.

  Rosie poured a bath, and whipped up heaps of bubbles with an egg-beater. Dolores sat on the bathtub rim, smoking and looking spiritless. She had taken her shirt off and was clutching it to her breasts. One thing about strippers, Robbie observed smiling, they’re modest when it comes to their civvies.

  “You’re in a good mood,” Rosie said. “Well, don’t cream your jeans – this bath ain’t big enough for the three of us.”

  “I know, I know,” Robbie said. His stomach a sunken tub of disappointment. He went to put on an Environments record: a lapping lagoon with chirruping insects and a distant mackaw. He lit some incense to cover up the smell of burning vinyl that emanated from the kitchen, carried several candles into the bathroom, and sat on the lowered toilet seat. Drifts of bubbles glimmered on Dolores’ shoulders and breasts where Rosie had playfully scooped them up, but she was looking gloomy again, and when she drew strenuously on her doused and soapy cigarette, vertical lines appeared on her upper lip as if she had been developing muscles there from years of applied smoking.

  Robbie’s thinking, Cool, this is like a magazine. Dolores’ erect brown nipples. Rosie’s heavier boobs. She’s bursting too big a bubble of gum, and now there’s a skin of it on her lips. They passed around a hash-oil spliff and Rosie murmured how womblike water feels when you’re stoned.

  Then Dolores farted. Rosie shrieked and, for the first time, Dolores smiled, too; her laughs came out, reluctantly, in a series of little short explosions. Those muscular lips of hers made an upside-down smile, and laughter spurted out. Robbie made a skeletal roof with his fingers and, resting his chin there, sat in stern judgement on his flush-handled throne.