Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  He scanned the windows of high-rise apartment buildings, took some small solace from all the erotic possibilities there, like a thousand drawers of ladies’ underwear. He thought of Rosie; the way she both embraced and laughed at sex. Why hadn’t he appreciated her warmth, and her wit, when he had the chance? This regret he felt was entirely unlike the regret he once felt for losing Ivy. No suicide this time around, thank you very much; this time he would learn the lesson properly, he promised himself, he’d find strength in himself, he’d make things right. He’d improve himself. He’d win her back with tenderness and imagination. If he only knew how or where to begin.

  He perused the head shops, stealing stupid little things, and prowled the warm Métro like Gollum, watching for people to drop precious items onto their seats from their pocketses. No one ever did, not after they noticed him sitting beside them.

  He glowered all around. Life is what you make it, was one of Dad’s Top Forty bromides, but Robbie had sussed that out for what it was worth: life can’t be what you make it, ’cause no one lets you. All these senior citizens past their usefulness, with their blue-rinse hair and rhinestoned glasses, tutting at Robbie as if he looked foolish; all these other prissy people, swallowing Muzak and process cheese-food and shit TV; all these drones bowing down to the gods of mundanity; all these cowards and nest-builders, making like their lives were achievements of note. Mr. Mills had said that Robbie was just an angry young man. Oh, is that all? Robbie hoped that at thirty he’d be an angry middle-aged man. People said he wasn’t nice, but weren’t there a thousand reasons to be not nice? Does he have to list them? It drove him crazy to think of the myriad petty proprieties, the routine humiliations life had ON SPECIAL! this and every other week. He felt unprepared to be civil at all, ever again; he’d step on people’s heels and not say sorry, he’d burp up their noses, become violent at the slightest provocation, anything to challenge this crushing routine. By being a nasty little prick, right in society’s face, he’d be doing his thing, he’d be his own foul artwork incarnate, demonstrating how trite people were to be so preoccupied with little rules, with niceness, with the seven deadly-boring sins those evangelists cling so dearly to. Envy, he’d howl, so what! Jealousy, greed, and anger, how petty! How dull! Sloth, avarice, gluttony, what puny stuff! How unexceptional, how plain, how mean. Robbie’s got way worse, if you want them, he doesn’t give a fuck – there are way more urgent matters in life than good manners.

  “I am Robbie BOOKbinder!” he shouted. People hid their noses in their bluespapers. “I am UNLIKE you!”

  He hung out with some street kids for an afternoon, doing scams and watching them get skanked. He got friendly with a foxy fourteen-year-old in a Spandex-miniskirt and barrettes. She was pretty wild; passing by a Brinks truck outside Birks, she minced up to the armed driver and with her scabby wrists outstretched, cried out, “Hey, handcuff me!” They were chased away. Later, down by the old Windsor Station, one of the kids had a chicken seizure on the pavement with the rig still wagging from his arm. Robbie took off when he heard the sirens.

  He snorted at weathered posters glued up around the city for bar bands he knew were doomed to fail. He stood in the heated doorways of pinball parlours, just as he’d seen winos do; for an hour he stood beside one, watching bow the guy passed time, like gas, smoothing down the pleats on his tuxedo dickey.

  He stood outside department stores and bummed quarters. Thing was, where once he had relished appearing down and dirty to passers-by, now he was ashamed because he had no choice. It was embarrassing to find himself at the level of all those derelicts whose panhandling he’d disdained all those years, but what could he do? Like a rubby and his bottle of bitters, he and his life were now distilled down to several small, all-consuming, animal concerns.

  In Dominion Square, the black snow – and skyrat-spattered statue of Sir Wilfrid Laurier bore the inscription,

  The governing motive of my life

  has been to harmonize the different

  elements which compose our country

  but someone had gone at it with a key or a knife so that now it read which compose our cunt. The flower pot at its base was filled with trash in frozen filthy water – cigarette butts, grit, bus transfers, ciggy-pack silver foil, Kentucky Fried Rat bones like Arctic mastodon remains – a record of twentieth century civilization. And here was old Joe Smolij. Robbie brushed a pillow of snow off the challenger’s seat. The chess pieces were spangled with frost.

  “Moof, moof,” Joe told Robbie. “Time is money. Money is freedom. Freedom’s for the birds. This I tell Spassky when I beat him.” He offered him some Canadian sherry. Robbie accepted.

  “You beat Spassky? So how come you’re here, Joe? You could be rich.”

  Joe looked at him. Such crazy people downtown. “I got health plan in Quebec, boy without a brain. Boy without money. You want to talk or moof?”

  Robbie found some money, later that afternoon, in a wallet on the sidewalk. He splurged on a BIG BIG HAPPY PIZZA, wolfed it down and got a wicked case of indigestion. Then he visited Classics, thinking of buying an art book. He bent over the heavy volumes, melted snow dripping off his head, and felt his toes thaw, as his imagination bloomed. New names, new pictures, new ideas for him here – De Chirico, Ernst, Miró – which he was committing to memory, to tell Rosie all about, to help redesign their future, as in-store security once more ushered him out.

  He would have bought something decent if he’d been given the chance. Passing by a newsstand now, his attention was drawn by Andy Warhol’s Interview, the Xmas issue, with Keef Richards on the cover. He went to Gino’s Paradise and read it ostentatiously there. As he drank bourbon and beer, he read about the beautiful people and imagined that he could be one of them, only even more beautiful, and in his own fashion. These vain, conceited people with their gossipy lunches and mindless hedonistic pursuits; Robbie’s interview would be more interesting by a mile, his reputation for fun and smarts unmatched, his Avedon portrait truly a register of style and the enviable life.

  Moving on for cheaper booze when almost all his money was spent, he discovered that Judy’s Bar, where Ivy and he once drank and rolled cigarettes, was burnt to a crisp. He sat in the charred doorway, like the entry to an abandoned coal mine, the dancing miners all gone up in smoke. He bunched newspapers about him the way he had seen the rummies do. He had no intention of actually reading them, but boredom got the better of him in time, and he foraged for the latest on Mr. Mills’ barbershop, perhaps, or the Dead Man’s Hands, anything.

  Chrissake! Here was someone he knew, in Allô Police: Louie Louie, the Louis Beaulieu. Who’d been busted.

  On Brat’s advice, Robbie knew, Louie Louie had begun to import reggae records from Jamaica for his new store, only some of them weren’t exactly reggae records; they were ganja, pressed in the shape of reggae records. According to Allô Police, the hapless pepsi had not bargained for the fact that Jamaican records aren’t shrink-wrapped, and so a dog in customs had smelled out the very first shipment. The Louis Beaulieu was now doing five years in St-Vincent-de-Paul.

  Rolling his eyes, Robbie saw a jet leave a short slice in the sky, a luminous paper-cut in the pale flesh of the heavens, and he wished he could be on that jet. When he looked down again he was surprised to see an old woman coming fast at him, all in black with a shawl and a cane. They almost bumped: Grandma Bethel! He hadn’t seen her since that fiasco of a Seder; she looked so small and hunched now, like a beetle, picking her way across the ice. The city is no place for old people, he thought. He stopped, waited for her to recognize him. He found himself smiling. Hey, maybe they’d have some tea and cookies at her house – he could tell her all about himself. She did look up, finally, but the gaze she gave him was uncertain. Her eyes looked huge through her glasses, darting like startled fish in a bowl, and she hurried right past him, leaving him to wonder if she had deliberately shunned him, or if his appearance was so spectral, his smell so alcoholic, that anyone would be scared, an
d shy away.

  Back in the Roxy, he tried to sleep off his hunger, folded up like a skull and crossbones. In his dream, he walks the streets alone. For this crisp day he’s surprised to find people have made a decision: they’ve had it with city life. Ice-blue sky above the silent skycrappers and there’s no traffic down here at all. He can breathe the air, it almost smells of the sea. A cool breeze, and a chip bag blows by like a laughing silver kite. It lands on a rich, green verge where the snow has melted away. He bends down to pick it up: the last one on earth, the final piece of rubbish, and what a sense of satisfaction to have finished the job… then when he was awakened by a heavy-duty jet roaring overhead, he had a ridiculous reaction: he whimpered for them not to drop the Bomb, to let this not be the end. He had so much left to do with his life.

  He tried to sleep, but hunger followed him under the blanket and kicked him in the stomach. He sat at the window, listening to the bleat and gurgle of the skyrats, his forehead slick with perspiration, his eyes closed, absorbing heat from the winter sun, the blood volcanoes erupting. He watched the specula slide over the jellied surface beneath his eyelids, jumping like zoo-plankton, like a cartoon cash register, like one of those Mirós he saw in Classics, whenever he moved his eyeballs.

  How long was it since he had eaten properly? In the Roxy can there was always the row of toilet bowls, unoccupied, their open mouths howling for more than he could give. He felt like a character in a high seas drama, cut adrift by mutineers, and becoming as preoccupied as children with their own stool; marking detailed updates on the size and state of it in the ship’s log. Woe. Six mere pebbles today, akin to gull droppings. No sign of land. Now will someone please wipe my bummy? The fever clung to him, sending shivers all over his skin, pulling the muscles over his rack of bones, and frequently sending him back again in a dash, only to make a paltry offering. Sitting on the freezing seat, he realized that what little he had dislodged was at least sending up warmth. So he sat a while longer. Sitting in the pitch-black toilet, trying to evacuate some spicy tacos. Delirious, perching up one half of his pelvis to give the muscles of his miserable ilium a better grip, he found himself thinking, Maybe this is what it’s like to have it up the ass. Kind of ecstatic. Painful euphoria. The walls of the rectum alive and hot. The outer body blooming with goose-pimples. His nose running. Other concerns just fall away; all the world is well during this little struggle, all the world is well. His life will change soon. Concentrating like this, he can make a change.

  Hunger makes you tired, he found, if only because you exhaust yourself thinking about it all the time. He wearied himself thinking about his body, worrying about his deadened senses, his dribbling sinuses, the lining of his bleeding stomach – ulcers planted there by cheap, spicy junk food and liquor breakfasts – and the cramps and hemorrhoids and the wasted nerves and loosened teeth he’d developed from all that bad speed. Go ahead, try it sometime. What he didn’t know, but could feel, was a duodenal ulcer that had inflamed his lower stomach, in particular his pancreas, giving him pancreatitis, and his liver, giving him hepatitis; the increased bile pigments in his blood had given him jaundice, which explained his yellow eyes, and the internal bleeding led to a case of pernicious anaemia, and frightening bouts of bloody vomiting and excretion. He didn’t just have heartburn, as he thought; it was his whole bloody gut.

  He watched a fly struggle to defeat the invisible wall of the windowpane. It had begun to bang and baffle itself the day before, and this morning it was still there, slower, bruised, still crawling stupidly across the glass. Robbie went out to get a job.

  He will change, and here’s his plan: to offer his creative services to the new management at L’Enfer Strip; he had all sorts of ideas for renovating it, and for a reasonable price, too. He heard Rosie’s delighted voice in his ears: it sounds like you care. No one ever gives a shit about us. I like you. Even if she wasn’t working there any more, he might do something, at least to give Dolores’ life a lift.

  He presented himself to the doorman, some new guy with a wide kipper tie, and eyes as grey as shark’s gills, and asked to speak to the manager about work. The doorman made a face as dull and heavy as lead in a sock, and told him to wait. Robbie paced the lobby, taking in the nude posters, not for the tits and ass, but considering ways to lend the joint some class. The doorman returned with an application form. Robbie was disappointed. He said he wanted to speak to the manager personally, but the doorman held out a pen.

  “Hey, guy, look,” he said. “I’m a friend of Rosie’s – I’m Robbie Bookbinder. Also I know Olly. You know, this was his joint once.”

  “Is that the fucken say so. You know Olly?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Robbie said, encouraged. “We go way back, fuck.”

  “Olly’s fucken history, buddy,” the doorman said, shunting a toothpick around his mouth.

  “Fuck. Yeah?” Robbie said.

  “Fucken A.”

  “Fuck. Where’d he go? I haven’t seen him in a fucken dog’s age.”

  “He’s dead, fuck.”

  Robbie quickly took the pen and the form. He read –

  RENSEIGNEMENTS PERSONNELS

  PERSONAL INFORMATION

  NOM/NAME____________________________________

  MENSURATIONS/MEASUREMENTS___________________

  DEFAUTS PHYSIQUES/PHYSICAL IMPAIRMENTS______

  VOS PREMIERES QUALITES/YOUR BEST QUALITIES__

  VOTRE AGENT/YOUR AGENT______________________

  COURS DE DANCE/DANCING SCHOOL_______________

  NOM D’ARTISTE/STAGE NAME_____________

  – and carefully folded it down to a tiny square. Then slunk outdoors again with burning ears.

  He went into a department store to scrounge free samples, but was given the bum’s rush by the in-store security. He shuffled on along the sidewalk, thinking black and tangled thoughts, ruminations on how to destroy the world, enraged by the noise of the city now that he wasn’t making it himself, and ended up accepting a coffee at the Christian Mission Drop-In Centre, after an eager young fellow with a brush-cut and polyester slacks called out to him,

  “Hey! Yes you! You look in need of some SALVATION!”

  No one knew Robbie lived at the Roxy, but Scurvy knew that’s where he’d been storing the equipment, and now it was the end of March and the six-month term was up. Bummer, because Robbie’d been hatching a plot to take the world by storm with a solo show, one in which he’d plug in a cacophonous kitchenful of appliances, TV sets, hairdryers, and other symbols of terminal consumerism and middle-classness, over-amplify it all mightily, kick it around, and let the feedback roar as he sang. If you could call it singing. It would be a stunning performance, the wild amplification of all his desires and frustrations. This was his new thing. Art on paper and canvas was dead; it had all been done, it affected no one any more. To be noticed today you had to perform your art noisily, force it on people, be a sharp stick in society’s eye. Like Mom; she’d made anger an art and performed it on TV. He’d howl in his own angry style; he’d wiggle his prick through his fly and grimace from ear to ear, splitting his face open to show how much he cared, too. That was the problem with the deadhead seventies – people didn’t care enough about anything, they’d stopped demonstrating anger.…

  So it was a major bummer to wake up one morning to clattering sounds, peek down from his gallery, and see men lifting the equipment away from its storage space behind the cinema screen. He crouched on the scaffolding stairs and watched in agony as they carted his last hope away.

  He still had Ivy’s boxes, and now in the Roxy he guarded them the way a dragon will jealously sit on its treasure; fearful of its theft, with no use for it at all. He sat on it, jumping at every creak the building made, sleeping with a steak knife at his chest. Out on the street he was watchful of slow cars, and he made paranoid detours whenever he returned to the Roxy, sneaking up the fire escape only after dark.

  Breakfast of eggs, with the white all runny, at the Mission, and Robbie fou
nd that he was the most despised of men, because even the rummies here looked down on him; they, at least, were on welfare, while he had never worked and did not qualify. He was a scummy punk with dirty fingernails and a mod parka scrawled with incomprehensible slogans, scrounging a free meal and smelling fiendish, when he should be out somewhere contributing to society – that’s what was written on their hoary faces. But Robbie knew he was better than them; he had been brought up in a lovely family, he had been to the theatre, his favourite artist was Rubens, he was blessed with possibility. There they all were: Joe and his chessboard, the bus-worshipper, the lunatic with the mat of hair, and all the other grubby bums, murmuring together and nodding smugly in his direction. He glared back and fired a finger pistol at his head, opening his mouth to let his eggs drool out like pus.

  Bingo! All it cost was a couple of bucks, and then you took your chances. He had earned six bucks giving blood at the Red Cross, and bought an evening’s supply of cards. Looking around him now in the church basement: ladies mainly, scrawny old ones with plastic net shopping bags, obese ones in cotton dresses, toothless ones masticating their gums; couch potatoes, welfare abusers, hunchbacks, alcoholics, the disappointed of the earth, the abused and the neglected, the halitosis-stricken, the slimy piss-poor, all those fallen through the nets of government statistics.

  “Under the G, forty-three… B eight… N thirty-one…”

  He found it hard to keep up. He was scanning his cards like a madman, six of them taped to the table the way he had observed the ladies doing it, placing his plastic tokens down as fast as possible, asking what number? what number? and getting shushed.