Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  “Hey!” Rosie said. “Don’t you here’s the church and here’s the steeple at me.” She howled again and Dolores sputtered, the two of them thrashed about like stupid smiley dolphins and banged their heads on the bathtub rim. Rosie choked on her gum and swallowed it, and that made them laugh some more. “Oh what, do you think Marilyn Monroe shitted ice cream? Girls are only human, Robbie, get a grip.”

  Rosie and Dolores weren’t exactly moving in, Rosie promised him. They were still officially shacking up at her apartment in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, with Dolores’ old man, Bill the Beast, but since the Dead Man’s Hands had started running their own highly profitable methamphetamine-still, up in Nitro, Bill and his friends had taken to mixing the stuff in its liquid form with their beer, and, smoking killerweed – parsley sprinkled with PCP – and they were getting rabid and unpredictable. They were partying hard and, Rosie said, starting to show up at L’Enfer Strip a lot more than usual. Rosie had convinced her to hide out at Robbie’s until the guy burned himself out, or got killed playing chicken on his bike, or something pleasant like that. Robbie wasn’t so sure what he felt about harbouring a biker’s runaway mama, but so it goes, that’s what friends are for. The only bad thing about having girls around is you have to remember to lower the toilet seat after you’re done – the first night he forgot and at four in the morning, short-sighted Rosie fell in.

  The next night, or the night after, in spite of Robbie’s spray-painted memo re: NO IDOLS!, a Hell’s Yells fan surprised him with a blowjob behind the cinema screen. In his electrostatic haze of speed and booze he wasn’t ever quite sure how it started, but suddenly, during a break in the sonic onslaught, he was up against an old Egyptian god and she was on her knees looking at him as if to ask permission. All he could manage was eyes as round as buttons, a smile with teeth as tight as a zipper. Problem with this particular BJ was, it wasn’t enough like those letters in Bosom Buddies, for she never said anything really filthy to him. She didn’t murmur or moan, or sit back from time to time to admire his joystick. His mighty schlong. If anything, it hurt. Then he sort of guided her head to help her. He looked up at the screen, and thought of that movie Ivy once brought him to, She Stoops to Conquer. The pictures came to him, like a film projector was between his ears shining images on his eyeballs; the celluloid strip snaked through his head, twenty-six frames a second. He thrust a little more eagerly, and he was welling up, and she looked up at him with her long face to see if he was close, and he was, and then a shocking thing happened: his semen came spurting out through her nostrils. Chrissake. He had only ever seen that in a Fritz the Cat comic, and assumed it was something that could only happen in a comic. She stumbled off to blow her nose. And after he’d pulled himself together, he walked out onto the stage to accept the crowd’s applause with open arms.

  If there was one thing he hated more than raking leaves, it was shovelling snow. Out in front of the apartment building, perched up on a ridge of ice, he raised the shovel above his shoulders and brought it down with a clang. The corners of the blade curled up like paper. His hands stung with the impact. He thought of the first pioneers, bravely battling off Indians and the flu and building log cabins with their bare hands, and how they must have got one fuck of shock the winter of fourteen hundred whatever. To find it lasted five months of the year. They must have lain in their beds through the dark mornings, under heaps of beaver pelts, watching their breath condense in columns above them, and had some serious second thoughts about the whole enterprise. Why didn’t they listen to their better instincts and take off home? If they endured it for the sake of future generations, well, they ain’t getting a monument from Robbie, he’ll tell you that much for free.

  Grumble grumble like that, and when other tenants stepped by, especially Mr. and Mrs. Grissom, he felt bitterly degraded.

  By December it had looked like it might be a mild winter. Or it might not. It was indecisive, which meant that the snow Robbie had so meticulously shaved away in the mornings, melted and trickled across the walk in the afternoons, and became a skating rink by night. Daily he chopped in a fury, sometimes taking an axe to it and hewing up chips of concrete and ice that flew in all directions.

  Two weeks before Christmas he’d still not paid any rent. Queenie Graves looked out of her window and invited him in for a cup of rosehip tea laced with rum. He gratefully wrapped his fingers around the cup and sat on her couch. Queenie turned the volume down on The Newlywed Game and sat beside him with her knees pressed primly together, her cup balanced uncertainly there. Her freckled cheeks were glowing like stewed apples, and Robbie guessed that she was already halfway through the pot. She watched him while he sipped, her eyes roving all over his face. He looked back at her, taking details in – the fine web of blood vessels at the edge of her nostrils, the freshly ironed creases in her jeans and George Jones T-shirt, the snail’s trail of silvery-blue eyeliner around her eyes – and the bobbing motions their four eyes were making, reminded him of moths in mid-air.

  “The girls’re in school,” she said at last. “The littlest won’t be back till after noon.” Robbie nodded, put his nose in his cup. He looked at her bare feet. Tiny spots of dried blood speckled the skin between her ankles and knees. She smelled of clean, static-free laundry. “I know whatchou’re thinkin,” she said. “I put her in as soon’s I could, see. I’m not one of them people who claim they kin provide all the education of a child in the home. I’m only thirty-one, I don’t know everything, I’m the first to admit it. Anyways, I shouldn’t be selfish, spoilin her all the time, pickin up after her for hours on end, when she could be out learnin to take care of herself in the company of other children. By the way, I been meanin t’ask, ever since the Grissoms started complainin about you – I’d of come to your door, eh, but I don’t feel I’m in a position to invite myself over – are you punk, by any chance?”

  14

  FOLLOWING THE DEBACLE WITH MR. MILLS AT THE HOTEL Bonaventure, Robbie spent the last days before New Year’s Eve moping about the house, waiting for Ivy to call. He snuck a lot of booze from Dad’s liquor cabinet, and sought solace in music, like Sartre’s sentimental idiots. He caught himself feeling grown up for having had such a heartbreak – being pleased he could feel such volumes of emotion, that he was so convulsively alive – and he hated himself for that. When at last Miriam called him to the phone, he had exhausted himself flailing at his pillow and weeping, the soaking self-indulgence made all the more delicious by the silence he imposed on himself to conceal his woe from the family. He rushed to pick up the receiver.

  “How you doing?”

  “Oh,” Ivy replied, her voice furtive. “You know me.”

  “But how are you feeling?”

  “Not a fucking thing. So stop asking. I’ve been drinking like a fish. Pure revenge, really – I’m giving the parents a taste of their own medicine. This way, at least I don’t have to feel, which you seem to think is so important. Anyway, listen to this: The crimes you have commit are worse than Hitler’s you have disgrace the family I wish you have been born ugly or retarded. If you cannot redeem yourself I will wish for your death. A note from the mother, can you believe it? And she’s been telling all her sisters about my crimes, too. Half of Outremont now knows about Robbie’s girl. You know Robbie, Robbie Bookbinder, son of the famous television host, Abigail Bookbinder! I tried to leave but she caught me packing and hit me with one of my books. She doesn’t blame you, not as much as the father does, at least – she blames books. She picked up that Canadian poet you gave me, Albert Camel, but it was such a slim volume, I barely felt a thing – but the humiliation still hurt.”

  Robbie was surprised that Ivy had strung so many energetic sentences together in one breath. She seemed to be enjoying the danger of the secret phone call, and the thrill of a denied romance, much more than she had ever enjoyed the so-called romance itself.

  “Your mother’s a psychotic windbag,” he said.

  “Oh, you’re a big help. Look, she’s not a
rational person. Here’s what she told me after she hit me – she said, I never want that you make love under my roof, I never want that you make love under Robbie’s roof If you want to make love, go in a motel. Can you believe it? I told her that’s what we were doing, and she hit me again. Even if I run away, what am I going to do, work at one of Olly’s clubs? I just have to accept, the mother is not a rational human being. Anyway, I’m calling quickly to say I’ve got passes to the Bones concert – it’s their First Final Tour of Triumphant Return! Want to meet me? It may be the last chance you have to see me before the father locks me up with the Ursulines.”

  New Year’s Eve, and the Alexis Nihon Plaza was bristling. Outdoors a freezing dark had fallen, and the sidewalks were glazed with ice. Cars jammed around the Forum, exhaust illuminated in the headlights and hugging the street, as if the cold had made the air itself heavier. Crowds massed around the main doors, under the escalators shaped like crossed hockey sticks. Ticketless fans hung around stamping their feet, trying to outwait the scalpers who were blowing into their hands and pacing. Robbie was feeling pretty dumb; one of the heels on his cheap shankless Beatle boots had got so soggy and rotted with salt that he lost it when he leapt off the bus at Atwater. Finding himself stepping unevenly, he turned around and saw the three-inch heel standing there on the bottom step, all alone with nobody on it, as the doors closed and the bus pulled away.

  The other thing to bum him out was – just as he was approaching the West entrance of the ice rink, since now he had to walk so lopsidedly, like a man on a peg-leg – the quart-size bottle of apple cider he was concealing under his parka slipped out and smashed on the sidewalk. The liquid fizzed and froze almost instantly in a thin white crust. Major bummer.

  “Hi! I got a ride,” Ivy said, boldly handing him a roach, right there in the street. “Olly’s a personal friend of Keef’s, did I tell you? They did time together in jail!” Robbie took a toke and held her round the waist proudly. Hey, maybe they’d get in the papers! For Ivy had dyed her chopped hair electric green and stuck gold stars on her cheeks and put on one of her father’s business suits with a pair of studded motorcycle gloves, mirrored sunglasses, and a flaming eight-foot fluorescent pink boa, whose feathers fluttered off to land and extinguish in the muddy slush behind her as they walked.

  The Forum’s outer halls were filled to the brim. Dad joked that rock ’n roll crowds resemble a compost heap, but Robbie enjoyed being stinky and ragged. It was an improvement, at least, over smells of Vitalis and Barbasol, which was the way he imagined those famous old hockey players in the photos on the Forum walls; he looked up at them and their coaches, all crewcuts and shiny chins, and he knew he couldn’t have hacked belonging to that generation. He just closed his eyes as the stone came on and allowed the warm and fetid crush to carry him along down the narrow corridor.…

  As the pressure squeezes tighter, he’s lifted off his feet. He can just see past the curtains, into the bright arena. Fans are hurling Frisbees and toilet rolls, and unfurling ink-blotted bed-sheet banners, while they wait for the show to begin. A recorded Bones number is pumping out from the ampstacks (the rhythm track rumoured to be the hyper-amplified heartbeat of a girl climaxing in Keef’s bed) and the atmosphere’s already hazy in the rafters. Suddenly the lights go down and a grid of spotlights switch on like skeletal pillars in a massive miasmic cathedral. And the crowd explodes. Still stuck in the corridor, people shove harder, pushing up on each other’s shoulders to see; it’s as if this giant music has a fist, and is pounding on the ground to send people flying up off their feet. Ivy squeals from somewhere – under Robbie’s armpit – and pink feathers fly up. The music’s so loud it makes the air as thick as wax, plugging Robbie’s ears, unbalancing him. The guitars scream like molten plastic like blue fruit like all the sadness of his life like something enormous and soft and majestic. He wrenches his arms free and throws them up like he’s on a roller coaster.

  The ushers open a door to divert the urgent flow of fans. Bodies are sucked to the right like clumps on a current, and as he goes this way, he realizes it’s the same route hockey players take to get to their dressing rooms. Fans are being herded to an entrance at the far end of this corridor to emerge, he guesses, at the east side of the stage. So this is it. His big chance, possibly his one and only. One of these doors must lead to Keef’s dressing room. All he has to do is pick the right one, and wait.

  He’s alone and in darkness. The crowd’s on the other side of the door, and in this oily smelling dark a plip plip plip. He fumbles about. Feels sticky fur on pipes, the ribs on an aluminum cable, the bristle of an upside-down broom. There are also rags in piles, a rock hard paintbrush, a greasy tuque. When at last he finds a switch and flicks it on to see where he is, a crown of prickling heat descends over his head and the muscles of his temples grip him like a metal helmet. He looks at the great white Zamboni, only three feet from him, its cab some six above, and his mind goes utterly blank.

  The door to the corridor has no handle on this side. He bangs with his fists and shouts, but no one will ever hear him out there. He bangs again anyway, and again, then rests his forehead on the asbestos wall and looks at his shoes. His fancy duds look suddenly goatish and irrelevant: the dumb blue Beatle boots, the flared jeans with the ridiculous slogans stitched onto them – QUESTION AUTHORITY and KEEF LIVES – the big stupid studded belt slung low about his hips. He stares and stares and listens to the room hum indifferently around him. And as he hears Keef Richards AND THE STROLLING BONES! take the stage in the arena, his eyes fill with tears and his mouth starts to go all wiggly.

  How old is he now? Eighteen in two weeks. What’s he doing with his life? SFA. One hour earlier there was nothing more important in his life than seeing this concert. Now it seems like a stupid waste of time. He knows it seemed important only because, by comparison with the apathy and uselessness of his life, it’s a major event. How ridiculous. He’s read innumerable interviews with Keef, and one thing he’s noticed is that the guy can rarely remember anything he’s said or done; he’s had so many vital experiences in his life – from the Bones’ riot-ridden Central American tour, during which he threw a toilet out a hotel window and beaned a Third World dictator on the terrace below, to the time he was taken to a Monte Carlo hospital after swallowing 50cc’s of semen (the wad of Albania’s entire Tour de France bicycle team) – but because he lives such an abandoned life, doing nothing that isn’t pure creative instinct, he can’t remember any of it. Robbie, on the other hand, is hobbled in the present by the memory of all his insignificant achievements, his every puny puerile problem and utterly uninteresting failure. He gnashes his teeth and calls himself a fuckingly fucked-up fuckup, and a dumbfuck hole in the head, a bona fide shit for brains, and more, besides. Through the door he hears the screech of a guitar solo, so loud it rides feedback’s spine. Then he begins to yell. To the rhythm of the Bones’ music that pounds on the walls and ceiling of this little box of a room, he roars blue bloody baby talk with his neck pitched back and his eyes scrunched shut. He can feel his throat heat up like a motor burning oil in first, painfully, but he’s determined to punish himself.

  Half an hour later, Ivy and a security guard opened the door. Robbie was sitting up in the Zamboni’s seat.

  “God. You’re unreal,” Ivy said. “You look like you’ve lost your mummy at the funfair.”

  “Arf arf, so funny I forgot to laugh,” Robbie said hoarsely.

  “So get down, it’s the intermission now. I’m with Olly, and you know who I just met, just one door down from here? Go on, guess. Keef Richards! The whole band, too! He was so attentive, he even invited me for a drink before they go back on. That’s now if we hurry, so let’s hurry.”

  The hockey players who regularly use the dressing room would not have recognized the place, but from fan mags Robbie knew every detail of the Bones’ backstage rider by heart, and had long dreamt of seeing firsthand what he now beheld.

  The neon lighting had been pulled out and re
placed with black candles, tall as spears, on eight silver octopus candelabra, which were flanked by the dozen Dead Man’s Hands contracted to provide security; the skate-scraped concrete floor was covered with plush Persian cushions and carpets, and in the corner, Robbie recognized Keef’s famous grandfather clock, whose hands had been bent around like Dali’s moustache by Dali himself. Guests sat on the floor smoking and drinking, and on the mahogany four-poster bed (the posters like May-pole penises), a girl in hot pants was giving two men in satin Bones tour jackets a blowjob; there were blood-red lava lamps arranged along the shelves where the Canadiens would normally store their gear, four state-of-the-art pinball machines, and in the showers, enough jeroboams of champagne on ice to keep the Bones’ entire entourage crazed (for if the supply ran out, the band wasn’t legally bound to play the concert).

  The group had developed an appetite for Northern African food during their Morocco days. Now an indecent heap of it was loaded, à la Bones, on an oak table that ran the length of the room: Spit Swagger was carving into a platter of b’stila – cuts of cornish hen, lemony scrambled eggs, and crushed almonds, layered between pastry flakes, dusted with sugar and cinnamon, and spread out on a thick, undulating coverlet of white lacy lingerie; Bile was pulling a boiled rabbit by the ears from a sauce of spiced tomato and honey, grinning at it, nose-to-nose; and Jerusalem Slim was using his spoon to cut up two molded aspic breasts, rising up like denuded islands out of a libidinal salad of eggplant zaalouk; guests were feasting, too, with honeysticky fingers, on briwat al hobb, “love letter” pastries; and at each end of the table, a marmalade gelatin mermaid bathed in a brass basin of orange-flower water.

  Dishing out the feast were several little girls (as close to eighteen as possible, the contract stipulated, but not a day younger), wearing ribboned frocks of rose satin hiked high to show off their stiff muslin petticoats, filigreed garters, and just an inch of tantalizing thigh. Their hair was artfully disarranged by the famous Michel Froufrou who travelled with the band, their faces daubed with thick white pancake and smudged black lipstick, their eyes hidden behind black webbed domino masks.