Kicking Tomorrow (17 page)

Robbie had the second floor of four, accessed by a winding staircase with curlicued iron railings. Similar staircases braced similar buildings all down the street, some twisted and some straight, each one with a skin of cracking green paint, as thick as bark. Across the road he could see the windows of other apartment hollows, each with a blue fluttering
TV
heart, and through the floor Mom was giving the third degree to some industrialist about miscarriages and stillbirths. The mist had shrouded downtown, leaving only the broken teeth of the city. The rain-streaked
concrete bunkers they call apartment buildings squatted cinder-grey at intervals, as if this was all that was left after the apocalypse: Montreal reduced to a stone garden, eerily quiet, its population evaporated, people’s phantom shadows printed on the walls and sidewalks, cars welded to the roads.

Rosie was crashed on his mattress, Brat on the floor wearing sunglasses with a crumpled cigarette behind one ear. Louie Louie had already crawled off to the poultry factory, holding his head and complaining of a shrunken skull. What a night. Robbie could only remember it in one big bundle: the jammed toilet at Arthur’s Hideaway stinking of urine. Mirror’s gone, smashed long ago, nothing but a shiny steel plate on the wall now. Him peering in. His anamorphous reflection, the real him:
his metal soul
. People are shoving in line for a turn at the urinals, scribbling, leaning over, comparing notes. The concrete graffitied walls.
GO HOME LES MAUDITS BLOKES
. He’s suffering from a bashful bladder – the pepsi goon squad’s threatening to squash his incredible shrinking penis against the cold and slimy porcelain, and all he wants is a private, unpolitical pee, thank you very much. Standing there thinking of waterfalls. Complicated mathematical equations. Anything. Hopeless, he’s terrible at math. It’s hypotenuseless. Faking a shiver, turns around aching and ashamed. Happily spies a vacant cubicle just then. Inside he leans with one foot braced back against the lockless door. Balanced on the other foot aiming as best he can. Wad of bloody tissue swells in the bowl. His own piss sounds like rain on a cardboard box. Pops a Quaalude and starts to count his money from an envelope. Amazing: one thousand clams. His kicker for this new life, tax free, all in cash. Plus a note, in Mom’s handwriting: Lots of luck, darling. Don’t spend it all in one place. When she handed him the envelope and Dad shook his hand, he’d wanted to say, No thanks, I’ll manage. But he didn’t, so here it is. A
flushing from the Ladies on the other side of the wall draws the water in his toilet down a little, and now the tissue looks like a jellyfish with its network of pulsing transparent arteries. He tries to stuff back all the bills, but a flyer slips out and twirls into the toilet. Fuck it, proclaims Robbie the Rich spitting royal spit, kicking the flush handle with his sneaker. Rolls back up the stairs bandy-legged, like a squid in warm water. This is the life, wallowing in the buzz of guitars like skiffs skipping on choppy whiteheads, fish with aluminum wings, seagulls with jet engines, electric veils of seaspray on the breeze. At the bar a jagged redhead sits alone, stirring her drink with a long fingernail. Robbie leans up against that amazing bleeping new video game called
Pong –
you bounce a little square blip (the tennis ball) off a little rectangular blip (the racquet), and welcome to the twentieth century! Pulls out his envelope. Robbie the Mighty, laden with booty, having pillaged, ready now to play
Pong
. The redhead’s hair is lacquered into antennae, her tile-red leather gear layered like armour. A boiled but living lobster. He imagines her naked, skinny and pale, ochre freckles all over her flesh. Exoskeletal ribs and rust-coloured pubic hair, sharp as razor blades. Heels on her feet that would slide out of her boots like the flesh in a crustacean’s claws. Their eyes meet now. Her expression: complete and utter disdain. Robbie shrugs and returns to his friends at a battered round table. Buys everyone a brew, winning many pledges of allegiance. The big buzz at the court is re: their old men. Brat’s is stinking rich, he owns Lovely Enterprises. Louie Louie, tabernouche, is papa as retire an watch de hockey an de game show all de days. ? tink Louie’s a failure, but, calice, e’ll be surprise. Rosie’s Daddy wishes he could have his daughter back, the one with the long blonde hair who used to read
Cosmo
, not this vampire queen, this utter stranger who comes home only to feed and fight.
Just shows to go
ya
, she says,
home is where the hurt is
. Lovely Enterprises meanwhile distribute plastic squeezers for toothpaste tubes and sno-globe paperweights and portraits of clowns on velvet. Hey, someone’s got to do it. Lovely Tunes for the perfect office environment. Lovely sentimental memory cards and posters. Lovely bargain-basement makeup. Lovely kiddie party loot bags, whoopie cushions, X-ray Spex, and square egg-makers. Soon the human race will expire, the cities will erode and rust down, leaving only Lovely Enterprises’ non-biodegradable empire. Alien archaeologists will sift through mountains of the Lovely plastic shit and have one bizarre time reconstructing this society, fuck. Ferocious chainsaw music thunders over the
PA
, sending strong alternating currents underground – the figures on the dance floor are tattered rats leaping about in an electrified cage. Robbie goes to the pool table, the felt blotched with booze and blood. A clutch of biker mamas,
bitchin splits
, are shooting a game. He lays a sawbuck on the table, grabbing a tipless cue like a lance. No one picks up the gauntlet. They play in a grim, defiant silence, stabbing at the cue ball with authority, cigarette smoke crawling up their cheeks, eyelids convulsing in squints, thorny-rose bumblebee death’s head chained-flesh tattoos slipping out from under their clothes as they bend over. Ignoring him completely. No matter: later, how much later he can’t remember, they’re all leaning against the scratched and greasy aluminum counter of the Baron Bulgingburger at St-Laurent and Ste-Catherine. At his grand invitation. The lobster lady too, a dozen other people he doesn’t know. The oily hair. The animal hunger. Dogs and burgs spitting on the grill. His bladder full of hot beer. Cops and rockers in line for coffees. There’s a rubby with a split head and dried, ketchup-caked hair lined up beside a stunning transvestite in a Louise Brooks coiffe and a lamé tube dress, and the whole banquet’s on Robbie. Chin on fists,
now, watching with disdain the guy in the mustard – and relish-coloured Baron outfit as the poor bastard struggles with the order. Drop of sweat falling slow-mo from the guy’s forehead onto a sizzling burger and Robbie thinks,
Not if it was the last job on Earth
. Louie goes,
Un penis, all-dress hOK, avec cum, blood, coodies, de works
. Rosie snapping
If that little wiener reminds you of your dick I hope you have a lot of technique to make up for it
. Laughing, spluttering spittle onto the counter, Robbie goes,
Turdburger pour moi, two order of spark plug
. Brat howling, drumming flippers on the counter. Louie Louie doubled over, headbanging and screaming.
Chose là, ah ouais, un
JAVEX
. Deux
PENIS
, un
RINGWORM
all
-DRESS UFF UFF UFF
.
And the guy in the Baron Bulgingburger outfit announces nonchalantly into the microphone:
trois penis deux turd all-dress deux spark plug deux javex un ringworm
. Weird fucken night. Later still, at Robbie’s new place, everyone drinks his beer smashing bottles against the radiator playing records at crusher volumes. All except the Bones’
Greatest Shits
, which gets tossed about his new apartment like a frisbee. And then nailed to a wall. What else. Clumps of hair, smell of glue. Rosie’s face laughing close up, silver bubblegum tumbling about on her tongue like a pinball. She’s cut Robbie’s hair and dyed it purple and glued it up like porcupine quills. A
punkupint
. Shaves his eyebrows too, at a sinister aquiline angle, an eagle’s wings plunging. Then bites him on the neck. He likes her, and could spend more time with her, if only she could make some serious adjustments to her personality. Because her idea of what makes a person interesting is all wrong:
Remember, Bob, when we met, you were with Ivy and I was completely nude!
Now the room’s thick with people and smoke, hot and sulphurous as a matchbox crammed with fresh-burnt matches, and Robbie, knowing he’s being an asshole, stuffs a twenty dollar bill into her bra and drifts away across an ocean of nervous ecstasy,
buoyed up by the idea that this is
his
place, all this noise is bouncing off
his
walls and making
his
ceiling tremble. Then realizing it’s almost midnight and he’s not been tucked in yet. Chest heaving
whoa!
over a wave of worry: without
his
mother will he ever manage to take care of himself? A cigarette butt he’s swallowed with his beer is floating like a raft on an incredible journey through his digestive system. The subterranean garden of guts. The squeezing fleshy tunnels. The acid baths. Placing the frostie like a cold snub-nosed pistol to his forehead he crawls to put a record on. On his knees before the stereo set he has an ecstatic vision of himself with Hell’s Yells, swinging his arms in an arena somewhere in the American Midwest, lights searing, stage like a raft on pitching water, guitars howling, and his own heart amplified like a big bass drum. The crowd throws up a bristling undersea garden of hands in murky poppling water, He Him Himself in the eye of this musical hurricane dressed like a killer ballerina, like a blood-stained peacock, like Poseidon on angel dust. But thinking, Mom and Dad would not be impressed.
Oh, but this is silly, darling
. Little Robbie like a raw deboned chicken suddenly, emasculated and wishing he could do it like Keef – mindlessly, meaninglessly, with total abandon.
Convulsive or not at all –
plunging through a massive pane of glass in outer space, plunging through it with knees tucked into the chest, head-first with the glass splinters slicing past the ears like shooting stars and heels like exhaust pipes. The image fast as a blink. Silly, really, but leaving no time for respectability or conscience or pigs or disappointed parents or anything. If Hell’s Yells aren’t abandoned they won’t be worth shit.
What’re you going to sing about then?
Rosie asks.
How about the environment, like your Mom. Acid snow. Sizzling springtime, and robins dropping out of the sky
. Robbie barks,
I don’t give a
FUCK
about the environment
, and feels his hardened hair pointing like horns up above.
He lives downtown now; there
is
no environment downtown. Vibrating like a rattlesnake he’s finally shuffled off his tender family skin. He doesn’t need anyone any more. Sucking on the nozzle of a glass water-pipe, gagging on the acrid yellow smoke. Holding it down with a wet snap of his nasal passage. Exhaling and passing the bong to Louie Louie. And now Brat has thrown up in the toilet. A spectacular topographical map of his delinquent evening that sits like a loose soufflé on the seat which in his haste – his arms are too short – he has neglected to lift. Against the tiled floor, a grin crawls across his white face like a wet centipede.
Technicolour yawn, man
. Robbie meanwhile is trying to concentrate, please: Hell’s Yells will be terminally dinful, he announces, toxic waste for city ears, a wall of shattered sound, white noise, urban congestion, a soundtrack of trashcans and traffic. Rosie says,
It’s easier to describe ugliness than beauty. All this silly rage! And you can’t even play an instrument!
Seething, Robbie tells her that’s irrelevant, all the beauty in the world has already been described, and technique is passé – you need only kick the instruments screaming around the stage.
By the way, Rosie, did you upchuck too?
For Rosie smells of vomit.
No, Bob, I cleaned up Brat’s barf for him. If you object, I can try and put it all back where I found it
. She turns her back for him to rub since as she says he has no other instruments to play. Robbie standing on the brink. A bridge of nerve endings sagging between him and her. Maybe he does love – no, he’s only confusing it with gratitude. The roof of the world is descending now, its old air heavy as wax in his ears.
Oh, for heaven’s sake
, she says, taking his hands and placing them on her shoulders.
You don’t have to look like I’ve sentenced you to
death.
I’m not really in love with you, don’t be frightened. I’m in
like,
that’s all
. Robbie staring at the back of her head, his fingers have no muscles at all. Which is when he has his inspiration. Makes his stomach spin to think of it, but
he’s grinning too. Here he goes. It’s all or nothing; he must go for broke, he sees. Spend every penny his parents gave him. How else will he ever be sure to do his own thing?

So, as the sun swam up the skim-milk sky, disturbing a pale film of curdled clouds, Robbie sat at the window of his new apartment with his remaining money laid out on the sill. Amazing: only twenty bones left. How fast a thousand went! Cruelly hungover, he watched the air pop with tiny sparks, synaptic explosions, and had a staring match with the luscious Eccelucci model on the billboard outside; when the model posed for the picture, she had looked straight at the camera so that now, wherever you were, she seemed to be fixing you with her gaze and defying you not to want to undress her. Robbie pictured the nerd at the Baron downtown wiping the counter for the last time.

Midnight madness, that’s what it had been – Robbie leaving everyone in his dust, cabbing it down alone to Old Montreal, to St-Antoine where the pawn shops are. Scurvy Music’s
FULL MOON MIDNIGHT MADNESS SALE!
WE MUST BE CRAZY!
and he’d splurged his entire wad on some battered old shit – though a thousand bones didn’t go far at all. That was
OK
with Scurvy; he said he liked Robbie so much he’d give him a discounted instalment purchase plan and throw in free delivery. The plan had a lot of pages stapled together: interest rates, forfeits, repossession clauses, payment schedules. Robbie figured, s’cool, Hell’s Yells will make triple this in half the time.