Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  All of this time, he didn’t miss the family one bit. Had he heard from them? Of course not. Dad would have spouted some bromide about a son returning only when he’s ready; and Mom would insist that, unlike other mothers, she would never bother him on the phone or embarrass him by turning up at his door unannounced. (In truth, she couldn’t phone if she wanted to, because Robbie’s phone was dead; earlier that week, a woman with a voice like rusted iron filings had grated in his ear that he had twenty-four hours to pay his bill, which was two months overdue already, or he’d be disconnected. Robbie saved her the trouble and yanked the cord from the wall.)

  It was a good thing Mom had started sending him care packages, though. Robbie hungrily ripped the first one open as soon as it arrived. He found sesame seeds, turtle soup stock, loukhoums imported from the Middle East, iron pills, seaweed. And a miracle hangover cure in her racing handwriting:

  Before going to bed, darling, take 1 or 2 g vit. C + drink 1 cup of herb tea w/honey.

  On waking, drink juice of a lemon with molasses + 1 or 2 vit. C. Go for a run or walk a mile or 2. Shower cold. Try not to eat – liver is busiest removing toxins in the midnight hours.

  Lunch: if you’re only feeling well-ish, grated apples and alfalfa should do the trick. OJ, o-oil, lemon j., 1 or 2g vit C.

  Dinner: camomile tea, steamed veg. Gd way to eliminate poisons, indigestion, muscle aches, fatigue, SLUGGISHNESS.

  love ever,

  Mommy.

  A brisk December afternoon and, Happy Chanukah!, Brat was on another generosity trip. He picked Robbie up in a cab, and they headed for L’Enfer Strip. Brat was nervous as a buzzsaw. Angel dust’ll do that to you, Robbie the discriminating substance-abuser observed warily. Wag your fingers in front of a neon strip and that’s the way the world must look from Brat’s perspective now.

  “Hey, Rob, now that the pepsis rule Quebec, right, there’s language laws that says the Lovely Fruit Company’s gotta remove all the stickers that read banana on their bananas. My Dad protests that that’ll make it too expensive to import them, so the fucken PQ goes, Eh bien, de Québécois will do witout bananes. Is that like, WHOA, or what?”

  The cab was still a block away, gridlocked at the lights, but the driver switched off his meter and said pleasantly, “Bon, les gars, trois piasses – ça va.”

  “Nice!” Robbie said.

  But Brat spat, “Wassat? Speak to me in Hinglish, man.”

  “Hey, hey,” Robbie said. “Read. Says three dollars.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m SICK of this. I’m gonna punch him out! Either he tells me in English, or I ain’t forking over a fucken nickel.” Brat opened the cab door, stepped into the street without closing it again. Traffic swerved around, honking.

  “Hey, buddy,” he shouted through the driver’s window and kicking the door. “Come again. Tell me how MUCH?”

  The cabbie signalled with his fingers, trois piasses, not at all nicely now. He opened his door. Brat wasted no time. He headbutted the driver. The driver held his nose, plopping out heavily onto the street, one foot jammed under his seat. Brat kneeled on his chest.

  “ENGLISH ENGLISH, you pepsi FUCKER,” he shouted. “Tell me how much I OWE!”

  A knot of pedestrians had gathered to watch. One couple cheered.

  “Hey, cool out, man,” Robbie said, dragging him back by his neck. Now there was the old familiar siren screaming. They took off, cackling like bats out of hell.

  When they got to L’Enfer Strip, Rosie gave them a look that would sour milk. No free beers were forthcoming, no hot dogs, nothing. Brat was still acting like a dickhead. He even looked like an erect penis, sitting three-quarters in his chair to ogle girls dancing at other people’s tables, his neck thrust as far as it would go. “Ever thought what a vagina is, Robbie?” he said. “A wet, smelly, sucking hole with flaps. And that’s what makes men crazy with love. Weird, eh? All it is is we all wanna marry our mothers. I know cause I read Freud, eh.”

  Robbie watched as Brat talked to everyone, calling strangers buddy, addressing the strippers by the names pinned to their brassieres; he was still on his generosity trip, buying beers all around and grinning, thumb-things up, as they stripped.

  “The ugly ones appreciate it when you’re nice,” he confided. “Whoa! When a broad has great jugs and she can dance, know-addimean, Rob, you arsewipe? I really know dancing when I see it.”

  Robbie found himself feeling suddenly prudish and censorious. He could just picture Brat at the ballet, knowing dance when he saw it.

  “Hey, guy,” Brat said. “You’re weirded out these days. Still hung up on that chick Ivy, I guess. Fuck me, you’ve got lousy taste in women. This Rosie chick, like whoa, toys in the attic, or what? You hear her on the radio the other day?”

  “No, what?”

  “Phone-in show about divorce, right, and she comes on, says her real name and everything.” Brat leaning over, confidential now. “She goes, ‘My Daddy’s got a new girlfriend, and I’m worried now he won’t want me any more.’ Can you believe it? What is she, twenty-three, right, she hangs round with dorks like you half her age, and she wants to marry her father, fuck. I’d steer clear if I was you, dude. Slap the salami instead, pull the pud, it’s disease-free. I took French Lit, it’s like Sartre said, eh, ‘the pleasure given coincides with the enjoyment received.’”

  Brat turned to the next table and picked up a conversation with a man in a polyester jacket with extra-wide lapels and a kipper tie. A stripper was engaged in contortions on the top of his table: she had propped her heels on the back of his chair with her legs suspended over his shoulders, and gripped the edges of the table behind her to hold herself up, spreading her thighs in front of his face while he ate his lunch.

  “Hey, buddy,” Brat said, “is this seat taken?” The man gave him the look of someone interrupted at his reading for the fourteenth time. “Hey,” Brat said. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?”

  “That right?” the man replied. He pushed his greasy plate under the stripper’s suspension-bridged body – and nibbled a toothpick. He fixed Brat with eyes as slitted and grey as sharks’ gills. “Where from?”

  “Jeez, lemme see, now,” Brat said.

  “You know Olly?”

  “Olly, lemme see. Yeah. Course, we go way back.”

  “Yeah?” the guy said. “I ain’t seen him in a dog’s age. I hear he’s out. How’s he doen?”

  “Well y’know…” Brat said. “I don’t know him that good really.”

  The man stared at him, shunting his toothpick around. He stood up and walked away, leaving the stripper to clear away the plate and cutlery.

  “Et maintenant, MESdames et MESsieurs, veuillez réclamer la charrrrmante CHAStity!”

  Rosie climbed the stage and pointedly ignored the boys as she started up her bump and grind. Robbie wasn’t sure if he should watch or not. By way of compromise, he stuck his nose in his beer and snuck glances. She was dancing without much conviction, cautiously back from the lip of the stage. She hadn’t even troubled to wear an outfit, and chewed her gum like a cow at her cud. Robbie followed her childish, myopic face and thought meanly, She barely knows she’s alive. It was the most obscene thing he could think of, but he thought it, anyway, and added, What is she doing with her life?

  Leaving the club an hour later, they shielded their eyes from the afternoon sun, and Brat told Robbie he was quitting Hell’s Yells. To be a male model, he said. He showed him the set of photographs he’d had done at an agency: Brat sporting a foulard and looking like his horse is coming in; Brat in a hound’s-tooth jacket gazing earnestly at a distant horizon; Brat in spiffy tennis shorts squinting into the sun and looking determined.

  Robbie, who had now glued and knotted actual nails in his hair and put a zircon stud in his nose, said, “Don’t you think they’re gonna need other poses? Like, with arms?”

  “Equal opportunity, man. I plan to sue the first bastard who rejects me.”

  “But I thought you’re gonna
work for your dad?”

  “I want it all, man! I get featured in the national talent catalogue. The head office is in Toronto, which is where I’m bound, anyhow – ’cause of all this PQ shit coming down, my old man’s moving Lovely Things to where money counts, in the language that counts. First of the new year.”

  “I don’t get. I was meaning to ask. What PQ shit, exactly?”

  “The election, numbnuts. Montreal’s the pits now. It’s going to the dogs as far as foreign investment, eh – the Yanks are backing off like we’ve switched to Communism. Maybe there’s gonna be a revolution, like hup against de wall, Hinglish.”

  “Oh, right, right. The election. But what about Hell’s Yells, guy?”

  “Well, I could of went the other way like you, but I’m opting for success. I want my bananas.”

  That evening, Rosie was in a rage because, after Robbie and Brat had left, the weirdo in the raincoat had come around again and called her a fornicator. Plus, the editor of the Montreal Star’s Lifestyle section turned down her idea for a photo-story on the Second Annual Tits For Tots Yuletide Stripperama.

  “Inappropriate subject for the Christmas season. Tell that to those poor little kids,” she said. “Shit. Maybe I’ll set up a home for battered women, I don’t know, a REFUGE from the Church.”

  They were elbowing through the last-minute shopping rush, Rosie homing in on every free sample, every demonstration, every give-away item the department store had to offer. She squirted eau de toilette on her wrist, answered a questionnaire and received an indestructible pen that was guaranteed to write underwater and in outer space, and scored a microwaved meat pie for Robbie. He chomped at it greedily. People stared.

  “Hi! I’m Robbie Bookbinder,” he said, “and that’s my Mom.” For there she was, on forty-five TV sets at once: a Holiday Season Special! presented from resorts around the world with a complete guide to sunscreens, six ways to recognize mercury poisoning when you catch fish, and how to tell if battery acid’s been dumped in a stream – before your children swim in it!

  What a dinful season – piped-in music, Salvation Army bells, Ogilvy’s in-store bagpiper blaring away. And now, with these commercials, they’re arranging carols like rock songs. The soundtrack to his youth, quit fucking with them. Who are the cynical old scumbags responsible for this? Own up. A security guard asked him to leave or stop yelling.

  “Bug OFF!” he shouted. He was ejected by two security guards.

  Rosie clung to him as they vaulted over a lake of curbside slush. “Blows me away how heavy life’s getting,” she said, and she was talking a mile a minute. “Like, I don’t think you should even come to the club any more. Did you notice in the club how all the announcements are French ONLY? I thought it was all that PQ jazz, and it is, but in a twisted sort of way – there’s been a buyout or a gang war more probably, cos the Jean-Guys from the Châteauguay chapter are all over the place, and they’re like RABID separatists. Dolores tells me things are heating up real bad on the biker scene generally in Quebec, eh – they say the Satan’s Choice have been absorbed by the Outlaws, and the Popeyes are facing off against the Angels, ’n they’re like animals salivating BLOOD from their glands! Even smaller gangs like the Dead Man’s Hands used to have a strip of the road, right, but these days everyone’s being dragged into the fight. Guys like Bill the Beast are just itching to DESTROY. I’m real scared for Dolores, I do hope you don’t mind us shacking up with you for good now, I mean that boiling water incident was one thing – she ASKED for it, sort of – but yesterday Bill tried to pin her hand to the BED with a KNIFE! For no good reason!”

  A second care package, which Robbie opened guiltily. He knew Mom’s birthday was shortly before Xmas, but for some reason this year he couldn’t remember the date exactly. She wasn’t the type of mother to remind anybody how many shopping days remained before her birthday, and he hadn’t had a chance to ask. He intended to call Miriam and check with her, but since he didn’t have a phone, he kept forgetting. He knew all Mom wanted was flowers. That’s all she ever wanted in wintertime. He could have simply stolen some and sent them any old day, she wasn’t a stickler for dates. But he couldn’t seem to get around to it.

  He delved in. Bag of wheat germ, seaweed strips, box of liqueur-filled chocolates. He ate the chocolates while he read the note:

  Remember, darling Robbie, yr body seeks always to get rid of waste. Junk food is exhausting because it’s toxic. Aver. human has 5oz undigested meat in intestines. People like Daddy who live on coffee: blood vessel dilation, irregular h-beat, high blood p., kidney probs, ulcers, restlessness, stomach trouble, blood sugar levels, and pancreas secretes insulin. Don’t! Preserve good PH balance, don’t make digestive juices counteract one another. Laughter, happiness, etc. is alkalizing. Anger – acidifying. Try the occ. all-juice gesundheitstag – good health day.

  Must go,

  love always,

  M.

  “An all-juice day,” Robbie repeated aloud. “Now there’s one fuck of a good idea.”

  The bones in a woman should be implied, thought Robbie the Famous Artist, but never pronounced. You wouldn’t say Queenie Graves was fat, but at least she wasn’t like most of the girls he knew; Rosie was as jumpy as a pinball machine about to TILT, Dolores was thin as a wire, Ivy was another rack of nerves, and, in a flash, he realized he was tired of all the skinny rib-caged junkies, anorexics, stray cats, waifs, fans, and unpredictable runaways who invaded his space.

  “Hey,” Queenie said, peering in. She had brought him another package, arrived Special Delivery while everyone was out. “How many books d’ya have? Ever counted ’em? Art books, right. You paintin today? Maybe I could come in and watch one day? I betcha see the world in a whole different way than other people.”

  December the twentieth, and Mr. Graves was due home on Xmas Eve. Queenie had appeared at Robbie’s door three times already, clicking her dentures and apologetically demanding the rent. Soon, Robbie promised her, soon. He tried to shut the door on her face. He was afraid she’d see what a mess he’d made of the place.

  The living room was a demolition zone. Those taped-up garbage bags did a feeble job of keeping the winter out. The radiators dribbled black oily water down the walls. Plaster, pencil sharpenings, flakes of white paint, pizza gunge, beer mould, and puke mould were all mashed into the carpet which, far from the Mediterranean blue that had first greeted Robbie like a holiday resort, now resembled waters that would only support the most undesirable life-forms. He’d torn up the Formica countertops in his kitchen, which were the colour of baby’s shit, intending to replace them with something more punk but had delayed the project until he finished the paint job on the walls; he had begun to paint the walls in red, white, and blue stripes, but his brush picked up dirt and hair and bugs from the floor and ended up smearing the matted muck all over. His iron pots had grown hides of rust, and his cutlery was just as foul on one end as on the other. The oven was a place so evil that even Rosie would hesitate sticking her head in it, even if she had been cured of her claustrophobia. Nor could he use his toaster; on an impulse one morning, he had brushed in a plump cockroach he had caught crawling across the top, and fried it – now, when he switched it on for toast, a sickening, meaty smell arose from the slots.

  After Queenie left, he didn’t even look into his latest care package; what was the point, health-junk probably. He took off downtown in search of meat for his intestines, leaving by the back porch. The front path could take care of itself. His junk mail too, which he left stuffed to bursting in his box. That’s how he’d avoid Queenie from now on – pretend he wasn’t there at all. Garbage he’d leave indoors, and lights he’d never use. He’d tiptoe around a lot. As for playing records, well, wouldn’t the Grissoms be relieved. And Merry Xmas to them.

  The fire escape was rippled with baby icicles, as round and regular as a dog’s lips, and it was perilous. When he slid down the steps, the frozen metal shrieked against its bolts and braces, and the gums of ice peel
ed off. He clung tight, his ass on a cushion of snow, his fingers sticking to the rail, waiting breathlessly to see if Queenie had seen him from her kitchen window. Across the back alley, up over the back of the Parthenon Self-Serve, Eccelucci’s sumptuous dollface watched him like the Mona fucken Lisa. He slipped off down the alley.

  One thing about not letting on that you’re home: you can’t turn on the taps. And Robbie was getting mighty stinky. He noticed this for himself the next day, waiting for Dad in the lobby of the CIBC building where he allegedly worked. Robbie was visiting just to say Hi, see what Xmas plans the family had this year, and to see if the old man was free for lunch, maybe. The security guard phoned upstairs, nodded, looked Robbie up and down, nodded again, hung up, and asked him to wait – Monsieur Bookbinder was in a meeting, he said.

  Robbie sat on a chair and paged through a newspaper. The ink was still too fresh to hold it close to him, so he stared into thin air instead of reading it, rubbing his inflamed nostrils, chewing on his tongue, and slipped a hand inside his shirt to feel if his underarms were wet. He smelled his glistening fingers delicately. The security guard frowned.