“Right,” Robbie said, “I knew that.” He was shifting now, from foot to foot. What else was there? Demerol, Percodan, Darvon. If he said too much, would the guy get suspicious, or would he then believe Dad really had sent him? He ran through the list in his mind, all the ones he knew with acetaminophen or codeine – Phenaphen, Tylenol, Proval, Alorain, PAC, Bufferin, Empirin – did they need prescriptions, or what? He was confused now, he just couldn’t think. His resolve was wavering. Fuck, at this point, he’d take anything.
He felt pretty stupid out in the street again, with a bottle of 222S in his hands, but what choice did he have? He bought a beer at a dépanneur and sat high on a snow-covered bench in Westmount Park to wash a handful down. Five, ten, another handful, fifteen. It was hard getting them down his throat – they were dry and sticking and made his mouth sting, and the beer made him burp and bring them back up.
After twenty, he was starting to scare himself. Was he serious about this? What was the point? He hadn’t left a note or a will, he realized. Well, Ivy would know the score. And would she ever be sorry. But how about Miriam and Barnabus, would they understand? Would they take it personally? Maybe they’d take it more personally than Ivy would. Another handful now, twenty-five, and another gulp of brew.
The park is buzzing now, the snow seeming to jump off the ground like a huge white trampoline, and his stomach’s raw. He pours more pills into his mouth, directly from the bottle this time, but there isn’t enough beer left to wash them down. The bitterness is unbearable. His tongue throbs. He spits out in the snow. Now he’s starting to weep. He’s afraid of what he’s done, and yet he’s ashamed to have stopped halfway; he’s ashamed by his behaviour thus far, but he just can’t face the future any more bravely.
He looks around him, at the naked trees, the indifferent traffic across the park, the Kiosk locked up and icicled over. The clap of a hockey puck on the boards of a municipal rink. He tries another mouthful, scooping up snow, now, and chewing it, too. It’s useless. Spits again, and shivers violently.
Taking an aimless walk downtown, his ears begin to whistle and his legs turn to rubber. It’s not at all like the amused and jellied stroll you get with shrooms; now he just feels queasy and weak. He might throw up, although that would be a relief. Stops at McDonald’s and buys three Big Macs with large fries – something to make him really vomit. But it doesn’t work. Down in the toilet he tries to gag himself with a finger, but he can’t manage it that way, either. Back in the street, he bumps into pedestrians bracing themselves against the winter wind.
And suddenly someone perfumy is clutching him and shouting in his face.
“Hey wow! Bob – Bob, isn’t that your name? We met at the club, right? I can’t believe my eyes, you’re just the person! I was just thinking, Why do men always have the hots for really BITCHY distant women? I mean, mystery is never all it’s cracked up to be. What is it? Oh dear… hey, you look awful. Should I take you to a hospital?”
At the Montreal Central, the nurses were utterly indifferent to his plight, and the doctor treated him with rough disdain. He felt puny. In a small voice, embarrassed not to have a more serious complaint, he said, “I took too many pills.”
“Pills? What kind? How many?”
See? No sympathy at all. And then, he’s forced to wait for over an hour in the waiting room, Rosie chin-wagging the whole time about her Xmas Tits for Tots Strip-a-Thon in a very loud voice: “I get forlorn just thinking about it, Bob. We got a photo in the paper, all the proud girls in their G-strings, did you see it? Us propping up a giant blowup of the cheque, for $14,000, imagine, fourteen thousand dollars, and Scrooge Central here won’t take it because they say it’s dirty money! The nerve!”
All those pills are actually giving him a crushing headache now; his ears are screaming like there’s a TV off the air with the volume up, right inside his head. He tries to keep pace with Rosie, saying anything, just to stay conscious.
“Maybe you should spend the money to start a union. Like you talked about once.” It hurts to move his jaw – it feels bolted on too tight. “You were right, it is gross where you work, makes me mad… what? Why are you looking at me funny?”
“Cos it sounds like – like you care. I think. I mean no one ever gives a shit about us.”
“Um, I… sure, why not?”
“I like you, I’ve decided. You’re together. Not half as out of it as you look. I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just great that in a way we’re both such losers. You know, I tried to stick my head in the oven once – just last week! – but I couldn’t go through with it cos I got claustrophobic.”
Finally he’s admitted, undressed, and laid in bed. A nurse stabs a needle in each of his wrists and tapes them there. He watches, vaguely pleased that it looks so dramatic – one tube for plasma, another for some kind of serum. It’s weird – his veins are swelling up like inner tubes.
An hour later, he’s growing concerned, however; no one’s spoken a single word to him, and now the serum bottle has quietly emptied out. The liquid’s a third down the tube. He’s afraid that air will get in his veins. Maybe he’ll die, which now he most assuredly does not want to do. But he doesn’t want to make a fuss, he’s probably being silly, so he lies still and hopes for the best.
Rosie pulls back the curtain and peeks in. Just in time. She sees the tube and shrieks. That brings two nurses in. One tsks and quickly switches the bottle of serum for a fresh one, while the other whisks Rosie out and returns to prepare some instruments in a kidney-shaped aluminum dish. A doctor arrives. The first nurse hands him a length of rubber tubing she’s coated with Vaseline. He holds it up, and the nurse with the tray fixes a funnel to the end. Robbie watches and wonders. Then the doctor shoves the free end of the tube up his nose. Chrissake! He didn’t expect this. The tube slithers up around his sinuses and then descends, like it’s alive, down the back of his throat. He gags, his throat closing on the tube.
“Just relax,” the doctor says, impatiently. He’s got more important, more deserving patients, elsewhere.
Robbie looks at him through a veil of tears, tries to allow the tube passage.
“Breathe through your mouth, that’s it. Easy.”
When the end of it has passed the involuntary swallowing muscles in Robbie’s throat, the first nurse produces a big plastic bottle of what looks like grey poster paint, and the second nurse places the dish beneath his chin. The doctor holds the funnel up high, and the nurse pours the paint in. “Just liquid charcoal. Go with it. Don’t resist now.”
Robbie nods stupidly as he feels the cold, thick stuff ooze through his nostril and esophagus and into his stomach. This is what drowning must be like; the stomach filling up like a cool balloon. He wants to upchuck. Is he supposed to? No one said. Go with it, what does that mean? He doesn’t want to throw up in front of these people – it seems like an indecent thing to do – but he soon finds he has no choice. With the tube still snaking inside him, he brings up a tidal wave of grey bile that washes all over the bedsheets and the nurses’ uniforms, everywhere, in fact, except in the dish. The second nurse gingerly places it lower on his chest.
Now his stomach’s filling up again. It’s such an unfamiliar sick feeling; you normally associate nausea with hot acids and a lumpy puddle, but now his belly feels chilled, and the vomit that leaps forth is smooth as paste and doesn’t burn – not like in The Exorcist, he thinks, humour being the only way he’s going to handle this little nightmare – but the second wave looks more familiar: oh hello, there are the Big Macs and the fries, there’s the frothy beer, and there, like buoys bobbing in the swill of a harbour, are the pills. Well, thank God, he thinks, at least that’s all over. But he’s wrong. They fill his stomach and make him vomit, spectacularly, twice more before they pull out the tube and leave him soaking in his own vile juices, panting for breath, stinking, and feeling like those cows he’s read about in the early days of seafaring, who got so sick they disembowelled themselves bringing up all seven of the
ir stomachs right there on the deck.…
He was discharged around eleven that night. Rosie had waited the whole time, so they walked along the Boulevard together, arms linked, past the dark Westmount mansions. His stomach gurgled clammily. The night was mild; unnaturally so. A ceiling of fog lay under the sky, bright as day as it reflected the lights of the steaming city. He thought of all the observatories in the world, whose once crystal view of the universe was now obscured, as urban grids expanded round the globe. And way beyond, piercing the mist, the docks and the bridges and the Expo ’67 site sparkled across the St. Lawrence River, the solid-state city glowing in between, holding out the promise of a better year, a life worth enduring – maybe.
After a considerate half-hour of walking in silence, Rosie said, “So, why’d you do such a crazy thing, Bob? Not over that strange little stray cat, I hope.”
Embarrassed, Robbie nodded.
“Wow. Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’ve seen her at the club a few times, eh, ’n there’s heavy guys hanging out there who I wouldn’t cross, but she’s all over them like a dirty shirt. Is she ever a minx! Leaves ’em with blue balls half the time, ’n she can get away with it, too, cos of who her brother is. She told you she almost went to juvenile court last summer on assault charges, right?”
“Uh no-o, not exactly.…”
“I heard about it cos the kid she almost tore out the eyes of is always bugging the Dead Man’s Hands to be a conscript, or what do they call ’em, a prospect, and he sort of hangs around the club. Or at least he used to, haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks now. He’s quite the slime himself but still, like normal human beings, even he has parents ’n they were going to press charges, eh, until Olly paid them a polite visit.”
“Yeah, well, Ivy and Gaston deserve each other is all I can say.”
They stopped at the Lookout to take the city in, the wind blowing through the bare trees of the bird sanctuary behind them. The blood-red lights of late-night traffic streamed away intermittently along the Ville-Marie Expressway, distant enough to be silent, not to wake the rich residents here. Closer, a car’s tire crunched as it rolled over a ball of gritty ice, and popped it, skittering, into a gutter. Two dogs did the midnight yelp. Robbie gritted his teeth tight together, breathed resolutely through his nose. Rosie rested her head on his shoulder and her hair went up his nostrils like spikes of fragrant grass. He pecked her forehead with his lips. She looked up at him, lifted her chin, and they kissed. And while they kissed, tentatively, tenderly, he listened to the heavy tide of sorrow roll up, roll up, roll up repeatedly, like a record stuck in its final groove, from his heart to his bruising head.
15
WHEN ROBBIE DESCRIBED THE GRISSOMS TO ROSIE, SHE HAD a simple solution: “Make peace! Let them get to know what a sweet guy you are, Bob. Share your vision of the WORLD with them. I’m sure even they were young once too!”
One more beer, then, and a joint for good luck, and they left Dolores to play records and be gloomy on her own. Downstairs, Mrs. Grissom answered the door, her husband behind her. They looked surprised at first, but Rosie was so effervescent they closed the door only to slip off the security chain, and welcomed them in. Both Mr. and Mrs. had white beards, and mottled onionskin stretched over their skulls. Mrs. Grissom had white powder caked on her face that stopped at her chin; the neck that hung in folds below was naked. She had pencilled an almost continuous straight line across her forehead where her eyebrows had been, or a little higher, maybe, and Robbie was struck with the impression that wherever she looked, whomever she addressed, she was waiting, querulously, for answers to questions she’d been asking all her life.
“Nice walkway, these days,” she said, and Robbie stiffened, radar tuned to the sarcasm frequency.
Old people – he’d known a couple: Grandma Bethel and her sister, Dinah. Robbie’s considered opinion was that, being from the old country as they were (though he couldn’t tell you which old country)… well, forget it, you don’t need to hear what his considered opinion was, you can guess. On sweltering afternoons, anyway, Grandma Bethel liked to wear pillowy bloomers with Canadian geese migrating across them, and Great Aunt Dinah had a taste for jewel-encrusted horn-rimmed spectacles. To slobber over Barnabus, they both had to painfully bend their bowed legs with the thick nylons rolled down about the ankles. Barnabus making a wiggly mouth and bursting into tears, and Miriam and Robbie just killing themselves at that.
“Look, Bob!” Rosie exclaimed, while Mrs. Grissom went to fetch them a glass of sherry, and Mr. Grissom lowered himself into a tatty overstuffed chair. “Look at this.” On the mantelpiece were numerous photographs in ornate silver frames. Eons old, from before the war: Mr. Grissom looking sharp, with Brylcreemed hair and a smart mustachio, plunging through the air, with his heels tucked under and pointed behind him like a couple of exhaust pipes. Robbie whistled with admiration. And here was Mrs. Grissom, posing proudly in a sequinned muu-muu, with a headdress of rhinestones and ostrich feathers, and standing topless in one, with one bare thigh thrust forward (not at all the leg she has now, Robbie notes uncomfortably, with the varicose veins like mould in Stilton). Her eyelashes were clotted black, her face was creaseless and shiny with luminescent lipstick.
“The inscription says, Empire Burlesque Follies of Montreal,” Rosie said.
“Yeah, I know,” Robbie said. He’d made the connection quickly, impressed, suddenly sorry he’d hated them all this time for just being old. “Jacquie Diamantine, and Marcello ‘Red’ Manzoli, of the Flying Manzoli Brothers. They were famous in their time, eh.”
“You know these people?” Rosie said.
“You got it, young fella,” Mr. Grissom said, getting up again with difficulty. “Direct from the Lido Cabaret.” Robbie observed that his long lanky body moved as stiffly as an old deck chair now, taut-hinged, hauled out from the shed when the winter’s done.
“This was your job?” Robbie said, meaning to compliment the old man, but thanks to his indelibly mean little gunslinger eyes, and his habitually sharpened tone of voice – plus, now, his punked-up haircut that looked like a wig of nails – the remark came out as a taunt, and right on cue an almighty noise started like a chainsaw through the ceiling. The Grissom’s chandelier rattled, and knicknacks walked across the shelves.
“I’d like to see you try it,” Mrs. Grissom shouted. “I’d say you have trouble just jumping out of bed – only reason the ass of your jeans is worn out is, you sit on it all day.” The old lady started it, remember that. “You are a noisy little bugger, ain’t you?”
“Free country,” Robbie retorted.
Rosie tugged at Robbie’s sleeve. “Why don’t you ask Dolores to turn it down, Bob? That would be the nice thing to do.”
“Don’t get a wedgie over it,” Robbie said. “I guess it’s just not your kind of music. Free country.”
“C’mon, Bob, let’s go. You’re wasted.”
Mr. Grissom’s face was shaking. His eyeballs swivelled in their sockets. “I can’t hear myself think,” he said.
“That’s cause you’re hard of hearing,” Robbie sneered.
“Go to hell, you filthy young creep,” Mrs. Grissom said.
Robbie struggled to undo the half-dozen locks on the front door, flew out leaving it open.
Rosie called out, “Bob, wait!” but he was going going gone.
He stomped away, kicking fences, Robbie the marauding knight, swinging his fists at bare bushes, heading for the Roxy. The first heavy snow of the year was drifting down out of the darkness, teeming in the light of the streetlamps. It was accumulating on staircases all down the street, all over this free country; it was collecting on windowsills, and the windshields of parked cars; it was gathering in the bark of trees and on the handles of trashcans and in the folds of scraps of litter huddled against the curb; and, as it melted on Robbie’s hot head it made his ferocious spiky hair go all limp.
Next morning, still charged, he’s tilting homewards with a bleeding throat and
a whole new fan on his lap, riding with her in the back of Louie Louie’s Oldsmobile Cutlass, with the back hiked up high over mag wheels, furry dice hanging from the rearview, 8-track, and fuzzy plastic bobbing-head doggie in the back. The car filling up with dope smoke just like in a Cheech and Chong skit. Robbie and Brat laugh about the stupid broads who take them seriously enough to get in the sack with them just like that. It’s hilarious: three Joes, K, just three fucken nimrods throw together a band, hack their way through some so-called songs, and in two weeks, look what happens.
“I got a Lovely souvenir streetmap of Montreal,” Brat says. “I put it on my bedroom wall and stuck little flags on it. Green ones is where I got laid, red ones is where the chick comes from.”
“Uff. Uff uff,” goes Louie Louie, punching the roof of the car.
“You throw a party, right,” Robbie guffaws, “and invite all the chicks you balled,” exhaling, and passing the joint to the fan. “They show, and they’re checking each other out the way chicks do, and you say, Well, I guess you’re all wondering why I invited you here tonight.”
Ironical thing is, he’s actually going off sex. The boys drop him off, and soon he’s back in his bed with the fan (relieved that Rosie and Dolores appear to have crashed chez Bill the Beast for the night), his tongue beneath the hood of her love button, one finger up her honeypot, another in her asshole, when he realizes he’s bummed out. Weird, eh? He just feels like an animal, humping in the age-old tradition – millions of years of it, what a bore. Sex, he decides, is definitely an old-fashioned concept. Anyway, it’s hard to concentrate on sex when he’s so completely wasted – the air is buzzing flies in his eyes and ears – and she’s taking so long he thinks his tongue will fall out at the roots. He can’t remember the last time he’s enjoyed doing this, if ever. He periscopes up over her belly. The muscles of her abdomen are heaving happily, and now she lets out a vaginal fart. He crawls up and bites her neck, as hard as he can. Now she’s really alive, digging into his back and nipping back. He bites her again, on the lips, hard, and draws blood. He looks down to where his penis is beached like a soft eel on her shorebelly. A wave of nausea washes over him as his stomach brings up a solution of fizz and that oily stuff they have the nerve to call popcorn butter. He and the fan look at each other, nose to nose. She makes a quizzical expression. This is a drag, he thinks, and pushes his face into the pillow. She sits up and wipes the blood with the back of her hand. He feels bad, but turfs her out, anyway – nicely enough, telling her that it serves her right if she refused to listen to his dire warnings about star power. She leaves with her clothes in her arms. He holds his head above his pillow and waits for the front door to slam. Then he hauls out his secret pile of magazines from beneath the mattress, pores over them, licks Kiki Van’s glossy pussy, and rolls over into a boiling sleep.…
Kicking Tomorrow Page 24