Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  From all he had read about the rising tide of immoral magazines and movies in the States, he imagined the country as a pornographic playpark. You could get anything there. In a community newspaper from Vermont that he had found at the cottage on Xmas day, he saw a double bill playing till the end of February that looked promising. She Stoops To Conquer, and School For Scandal, starring some stud called Richard Brinsley Sheridan, if he remembered correctly. (It was amazing how Robbie could remember names and facts if he really put his mind to it.)

  It was a four-hour bus ride from Montreal to Granby, Waterloo, Magog, Sherbrooke, on to North Troy, Newport, West Charleston, and then Derby Line, where the Constitution Playhouse had been since the turn of the century. As the bus pulled out of the terminal, Robbie couldn’t believe what he was doing. Was it so important to go so far? He was jittery, his blood fizzing with tiny air bubbles that propelled him on this desperate journey. His head was filled with forbidden delights: honeypots and joysticks galore. He pictured the location of the Constitution Playhouse: a special street, lined with throbbing sex stores and massage parlours. Since Derby Line, Vermont, was only a little bigger than the community in Kilborn, he didn’t imagine there would be a strip the size of a major fun fair, but he had his hopes up. All the American cities had them; wasn’t every mayor embroiled these days in trying to shut them down? Boston’s Combat Zone, New York’s 42nd Street, L.A.’s Hollywood and Vine. And one of the reasons he was going now was he feared the mayors might succeed before he ever got there.

  On his way home again to Rosie, it was dark inside the bus. In the headlights, a galaxy of snowy stars zoomed in and out of the infinite. What a total goof he felt. He put his nose to the glass and replayed his day while he watched the cat’s-eyes light up and the highway’s centre line peel up off the tarmac like a strip of luminous tape.…

  He had stood nervously in line at U.S. Customs; all the passengers on the bus had been required to step off for inspection. When his turn came, he had been asked for his passport or a birth certificate. That was a shock – he had been across the border with his family so often just to eat at that little country restaurant in the mountains of Vermont, and the officer had never asked them for a passport. The customs officer was young, brush-cut, and wiry, and smacked of men’s soap. He had only one arm. He looked Robbie up and down, and curled his lip in displeasure.

  “What is the purpose of your trip, sir?”

  “The purpose? The purpose is sightseeing and – uh – friends.”

  “And what do you have in that bag, please?”

  “Oh, nothing much. Some art. If you can call it that, arf arf.”

  “Open it for me, please.”

  Robbie unzipped the suitcase. He wasn’t worried. The inspection that would make him anxious was on his return, when the suitcase would be several magazines heavier. The one-armed officer had trouble flipping through the sketches and rolled-up canvases and album covers and scraps of paper, so Robbie helped him, doing a real eager salesman trip on the guy. “This was going to be my first professional gig, for a nightclub, eh, and these are my album cover designs, like them? And this one I don’t dig so much, but these –”

  “Is your trip for business, sir, or pleasure?”

  “Why, for pleasure, like I said. Friends, like.”

  “Bullshit. Whut are the names of your friends?”

  Robbie scrambling now. That swear word has had quite an unpleasant impact on him. “Uh, well, there’s Rosie and Baim – Abraham – and Louie.”

  “Bullshit. Looey is a French name. Whut is your business, sir? Do you have a work permit? If not, I shall have to refuse you entry, sir.”

  It was pointless to insist. Robbie stuffed his artwork back, gnashing his teeth, and carried the heavy portfolio back out into the terminal area. He found a dépanneur on this, the Canadian side, bought a six pack of Molson, and sat in the foul-smelling, piss – and dust-filled waiting room till dusk.

  After a while, he felt some relief that it was all over, that he hadn’t gone to Pornville after all, and sated his repulsive seething desire. Mainly, he felt the old goatishness grow all over him. He slapped himself. Stupid. A traveller glanced at him from the bench by the door, quickly returned to studying the hem of her skirt.

  On the bus back, he pees a torrent into the toilet. He’s drunk again and full to bursting. Drunk as a, as a… trout, he thinks to himself, for his vision’s a fuzzy fish-eye lens inside this tiny room. The bus is lurching wildly on the snow-covered country roads, and his pee is looping all over the place like a skipping rope that’s been let go on one end. The window, frosted over like ground glass, lights up periodically as cars overtake the bus. He turns on the hot water, which comes out scalding, and mists up the chilled mirror above the sink. He rubs it and looks at himself. He’s hard to see. He can barely recognize himself. The image looks like the ghost in him. Moisture collects and dribbles down. He feels sick. He has sunk to this.

  He was thinking about Rosie, curled up in his apartment and licking her wounds as, three hours later, he rounded the corner by Wu’s Grocery and the Parthenon Fil-U-Up. It was snowing heavily now, and bitterly cold. He stopped still.

  A small crowd had gathered outside his apartment. The dim streetlamps and Eccelucci’s billboard made the falling snow fizz with electric light. Robbie’s stomach clenched, tight as a fist. He hesitated, considered ducking down the back alley, but there was Rosie at the top of his stairs, and she had spotted him. She waved him over frantically.

  The crowd was made up of tenants and neighbours. Queenie Graves was there, and her husband. Mrs. Grissom was standing in her nightgown and overcoat, moaning. Big Mr. Graves and another man were laying a dark body on a blanket. Mr. Graves slipped on the ice as he bent down to lift the body up, and landed hard on his knee.

  “Hi,” Robbie said, stupidly. “What’s up?”

  Everyone turned to look at him. Their faces were shrouded and shrunk beneath their hoods and hats. They lifted old Mr. Grissom and carried him into his apartment, and Mrs. Grissom followed after him. She shot an evil face at Robbie. He shrugged. What did she want him to say? All right, it was his fault, maybe he hadn’t done his shovelling job as well as all that – anyway, he’d thought he was off the hook after Rosie paid the rent. There was no use in getting on his back about it now. Sorry. K, satisfied?

  He climbed his stairs. He was wondering how he was going to explain his suitcase to Rosie. In the end he didn’t have to; she was so distressed that, when everyone had dispersed, he was able to distract her by cracking a feeble joke.

  “By popular request,” he said in a TV announcer’s obituary voice, “Mr. Grissom, AKA Marcello ‘Red’ Manzoli, has flown through the air with the greatest of ease. For the very last time, it is feared.”

  When Mr. Graves told him he better clear out that very week, Robbie was not surprised, but he was aggrieved; when he asked Mr. Graves for a good reason, the guy just made a fist, and called that one.

  His relationship with Rosie was strained to the limit of their endurance, as well. Robbie was sick of the way she analyzed his every move, his every word. He didn’t have to be told he was afraid of confronting his own failure; he didn’t need to hear he was building patterns of procrastination; it was none of her business that he rationalized his ignorance by hurling abuse at the status quo; he never asked anyone to tell him he pursued impossible dreams, or, that like most men with a problem, he put Ivy up in an ivory tower of unattainable desire.

  “You didn’t use to have any of these clever-dick ideas,” Robbie said. “Don’t get so high on your horse. You’re just getting them now from books. You should stick to women’s magazines. I can’t get a handle on you any more. You’re the one in need of shrink-rapping.”

  “Ha ha. You can’t discredit my ideas ’cause I get them from books, you condescending male-chauvinist jerk,” Rosie retorted, chewing her gum militantly, with marching jaws, chewing at him.

  “Hey, I only say that ’cause I care for
you.”

  “So care for me a little less.”

  “So I suppose you didn’t like the Valentine I gave you yesterday.”

  “Oh that. A shoebox coffin with LOVE scrawled in blood on the inside? That’s when I first saw the light of day.”

  “Hey, I did it my way, OK. Whaddo you want? Least I’m here, aren’t I? Least I’m around. Isn’t that a show of, um, of love?”

  “Oh, Bob, why couldn’t you just give me chocolates? I can’t get a handle on you, either. Before, there was someone who was compassionate and brave. Now I see a person all wrapped up in himself and projecting his insecurities on others. On me.”

  “K, OK. Since you put it that way. Here’s something funny,” Robbie snapped, “You always talk about seeing ‘this person who’ and ‘that person who’, like I’m someone who’s not standing right in front of you, which I am. Well, if you don’t want to see stuff, s’OK with me, but don’t deliberately put me out of focus, too. That’s how you sound when you talk about me – like I’m out of focus.”

  He said that weakly, because he knew he was only resentful of being nailed down. He especially resented her when her analysis was dead on. He wouldn’t permit her such conceit. He didn’t like to seem so transparent. He fancied that he had a personality as bewildering as a house of mirrors. He flattered himself that he reserved judgement on other people until he had given them a fair chance.

  “You’re just jealous of everything I do,” Rosie sniffed. “You’re so jealous you even hate it when I’m involved with a book. Typical male – to you women are footstools or pedestals. You wish I’d pose for you all the time like, like…” She pointed out the window. “Like that horrible billboard. You liked me better when I was at the club because I was caged there. You’re no better than the bikers who took over the place. Poor Dolores, she’ll never get out, now. But I have. I’m different. I’m fed up with being forlorn. Oh, and by the way, I’ve got a brand-new method of contraception – staying away from men like you.”

  “I’m not jealous,” Robbie said. “I just don’t GIVE a fuck.”

  To add insult to injury, he learned that during his frequent absences, Mrs. Grissom had helped Rosie convalesce and they were now fast friends; the old lady had recommended that Rosie adopt Robbie’s apartment, and Queenie said that was fine if it meant Robbie never showed his face again. “One good turn deserves another,” Rosie told him. “That whole hospital experience was a trauma for Mr. and Mrs. Grissom. The nurses and staff are getting real uppity these days. Mrs. Grissom was given a form in French which she couldn’t understand ’n she couldn’t communicate Mr. Grissom’s allergy to penicillin. It was a real bad scene – they almost finished the job you started. Anyhow, now that Mr. Grissom is pretty much incapacitated, I don’t mind running errands for them. We’re a mutual appreciation society. I’m the apple of their eye.”

  He goes walking on the mountain, to retrace the route he and Ivy took after blowing off class that magnificent first day of their so-called relationship. He climbs up to Lac Aux Castors, his belly bubbling with two pints of warm apple cider he lifted from Wu’s grocery, and the snow fills his sneakers. The great iron cross on the Eastern bluffs looms dark against the whale-grey afternoon. At night, it must look comforting to some people, illuminated and seen for miles, but up close by day it’s cold and utilitarian. From its base he can see the paint peeling off its steel stilts, and more than a quarter of the lightbulbs have been smashed. Arching his neck, he also sees something fluttering in the wind, hooked high up on one of the surviving bulbs; a bit of cloth perhaps, a weatherworn shopping bag. No, it’s a pair of panties. Robbie looks around him, almost as if he were the guilty one. But there’s no one around. A tidal wave of frost blows up over the crest.

  He always liked to believe the legend that once upon a time Mount Royal was an active volcano. Now, skaters cut shining curves in the ice where the plateau stretches across the lake to the north. Southwards the slope jumps away steeply to where Montreal lies, belching up thick stacks of gas to scud and dissolve in the heaving air. The storm clouds suck up all the colours of the land and the sky, which become indistinguishable from one another; the glass of the skycrappers reflected grey, the snow loses its glint, the solid-state city rusts, fizzes, and crackles out. Lac Aux Castors is an abscess on the hip of this old man mountain, the chilly pollution rippling below the ice and accumulating on the shore in a pale scab of frozen sand.

  He stands there and stands there. When the snow begins to fall, the skaters throw their gear in the trunks of their cars and drive away. Robbie just stands there, hearing the mountaintop bristle with speech; the naked trees seem to be mocking him, criticizing him, throwing their arms up in exasperation. The wind howls abuse, echoing all the voices of his experience and stirring them about in his ears. The wind pushes at his back with a huge, forceful hand, actually shoving him forward. It’s as if Nature’s fed up with him; she’s been raped and beaten and ignored, and now she’s had enough. For some reason, she’s going to take it out on him first. The mountain seems to want to buck him off, for Robbie finds himself tripping and falling the way you do in a frustrating dream, and always landing on his bad hand. He’s hot and flushed as he tries to make his way home. Home? He has no home. He’s made a terrible mistake and he knows it. Can he ever make it up to Rosie now? He loses his bearings and finds himself overlooking the great Mount Royal graveyard. His teeth are clacking uncontrollably. He has a nasty tumble down the east slope, back towards Fletcher’s Field, and bashes his head on a rock. He slinks downtown on weak legs and numb feet, bent over with a morose epiphany: life giving his arse a damn good kicking.

  He wandered blankly for an hour, kicking trash cans across sidewalks, throwing gritballs through apartment windows and running off, stopping occasionally to take a whiff from a bottle of airplane glue, and found himself passing by the school on Côte-des-Neiges just as a flock of girls was being released. He walked briskly on this time, looking down at slush. He heard his name called. He looked up. It was Miriam, clutching her satchel to her chest as she galumphed towards him the way thirteen-year-old girls do: shoulders chugging, ankles flying up in opposite directions, head thrust forward, and ponytails whipping about like snapped reins. She was out of breath by the time she had crossed the street.

  “Hi! Hi! Let me take you for tea, big brother.”

  In the Toman café, Miriam paid, and Robbie hoovered up two slices of Black Forest cake, three Florentines, and a bowl of cappuccino.

  “Yes, folks,” she announced to the old ladies at the adjacent table. “My brother, the Amazing Human Garburetor.” Robbie smiled shyly, licked chocolate from his fingers.

  They sat silently for several minutes. Then he lied about gigs for the group, and a windfall lottery win, and a growing friendship with Rosie.

  “She’s a nutcase on the outside,” he assured her, “but dead serious on the inside. She loves me. We love each other. So – do you have a boyfriend? ’Cause if you do I’ll kill him.”

  “S’matter of fact, I do,” Miriam said, blushing. “Funny ’cause I wanted to ask you if I, if he, like, if he wants to go further than I want to, you know, well, should I let him?”

  “What’re you talking about?” Robbie said. “Of course not.”

  Miriam looked down, sucked noisily on her straw. Robbie picked up his fork and scraped a thin film of chocolate from the enamelled rim of his plate. When he put it in his mouth, all he got was a tongue-zap from the fork’s burnt prongs.

  “But then maybe he won’t like me,” Miriam said, chewing on the straw.

  “Miriam,” Robbie said, getting very excited suddenly and raising his voice. One old lady looked over. He leaned across the table, nose to nose with his sister. “You gotta always remember this, OK? If he’s not thinking of what you want, first, you don’t need the stupid creep near you. Get it?”

  “OK, OK, I got it,” Miriam said, sitting back. Now the straw was just a scribble of plastic between her teeth.

&n
bsp; “Good. Sorry if I scared you, but I’ve been experienced.”

  “Nothing scares me.”

  “Well, it should. And don’t lay that sort of talk on me, it doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “OK, OK. Oh, guess what. Mom’s show got dumped. Lousy ratings. Then she got arrested again, just for a day. She went on a march to try to close down the EPX factory, there were dozens of people, the most ever. She chained herself to the fence this time and threw the key in the snow. First they had to clip the fence then they arrested her. It was so great. By the way, Mom and Dad say you’ll never come home until you’ve well and truly left it. What does that mean, exactly, and have you left yet?”

  20

  THE ROXY WASN’T SUCH A BAD PLACE TO LIVE, EXCEPT THAT it was dark and cold and Robbie couldn’t tell anyone he was there. He laid out blankets in one of the old dressing rooms, hid Ivy’s satchel under a cardboard box, and called the place home. After midnight, he fed like a rodent on the goodies at the candy counter. He learned to thread the projectors, too, and sat alone in the cinema, front row centre, watching Woodstock as often as he pleased, stuffing himself to the gills with oily popcorn.

  During one unnatural thaw, the snow outdoors had melted away to reveal bedraggled red tinsel on muddy shitty lawns, but now it had frozen over again and the sidewalks were blistered with the skin of icy puddles. He went out to sit on walls and benches. On a crusade of joyless destruction, he tilted at mailboxes, spilling envelopes into the slush. How he hated the city suddenly, this environmentless place. He watched the pigeons – skyrats – and observed why their shit is so corrosive: they eat stuff even he’d turn down – there was nothing of value here for him, nothing he could save or call his own. Nature had been kicked out, exiled to the mountaintop, where she brooded acidly. He was wondering how he could ever have been so in love with the city – this giant garbage compactor, this concrete compressor of soured desires. A truck roared by, hitting a pothole, and its rear section slammed down onto its chassis, brakes screaming. Robbie held his ears and thought of Kilborn and how pleasant it would be to bask on the terrace overlooking the lake.