Kicking Tomorrow (28 page)

“De ting dat crack me up de most, hostie,” Louie Louie told him, “is when de cock chase de hen. E chase and chase till e wear er hout. E got appy feet, e pull her on like a rubber boot. I get such a ardon to watch dat I can’t close my heyelid.”

Robbie craned his neck back to look at the lofty ceiling of the slat-and-litter house. Hanging from the rafters were neon strips, whose jittery light cranked up the nervous atmosphere of several thousand chicks awaiting debeaking.

“This your job, too?” Robbie said, pulling his T-shirt over his nose. “Shovelling out the doo doo?”

Louie Louie told him chickens have such cast-iron stomachs they can eat their own waste, and human waste, too. The thrifty farmer who owned this place had housed the chicks near the workers’ can, and channelled a sluice over to enrich the mash that flowed past them on conveyor belts. Robbie had come with near-serious intentions, but he knew immediately that this was one more job that made not paying the rent look attractive.

He sat while Louie Louie debeaked. It wasn’t just a joe job, Louie Louie pointed out proudly, it required precision and experience. If you didn’t do it right, either you risked cutting off the chick’s tiny tongue, or the beak grew right back again, and
debeaking a chick that’s older than ten days is way more difficult. Robbie watched as Louie Louie positioned himself in front of the machine.
The
Louis Beaulieu held a chick with his thumb at the back of its head, and his forefinger under its throat. He squeezed its throat lightly, causing the chick’s tongue to pull back, and inserted the beak in a hole on the face of the machine. The beak hit a trigger, a hot blade dropped down and sliced it clean off.

“It look cruel,” Louie Louie said, “mais faut le faire, t’sais, in crowded cage like dese, cause chicken are cannibal and are gonna peck each another raw, udderwise. Mos funny ting is,” he chortled as he picked up a squirming chick, “you’re not suppose to de-beak when dey’re hunder stress. Hunder stress, uff. Uff uff.”

“Chrissake. How many do you do in a day, man?”

“Two tousand an hour, maybe.”

“Two
thousand?
Fuck. That’s your
job?”

“Halso. I clip de toes of de female. Just like Suzette, wit de salon, who I gave de great doggies. Uff uff. And I de-wing too, and I dub, which is cut off de comb of de pullet.”

“Chrissake. What’s left of ’em when you’re done?”

“Kentucky Fry Rat, mon chum. Uff. Uff uff.”

Louie Louie treated Robbie to lunch in his cubbyhole – Pepsi, tourtière mini-pak, tarte au sucre, Mae West. From his locker, he handed back a book Robbie had lent him, an erotic classic Ivy had once lent Robbie:
The Autobiography of a Flea
, by Anonymous.

“C’est-tu ben platte, cette affaire là,” he said. “Where de dirty part? Explique, hostie, ç’a pas d’sense.”

“Let’s see,” Robbie said.
“Thus she pumped from Clement a fourth discharge, and reeking in the excessive outpouring of a seminal fluid, as well as fatigued with the unusual duration of the pastime, she disappeared to contemplate at leisure the monstrous proportions and unusual capability of her gigantic confessor.”

“Taberslaque! Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire?”

“Fucked if I know. But it used to turn Ivy on, I’ll tell you that much for free.”

“Now
dis,”
Louie Louie said, pointing to a
Bosom Buddies
calendar on the wall by his desk. “Dis hi unnerstan.
Ayy
, Robbie mon vieux, when you jerk off han de baby batter go in your navel, you hever dip your celery in dat?”

Several midnights a week, Robbie skidded over downtown blocks of matte black ice to the Roxy, the streets flecked with hunched up figures, the massed steel-wool clouds foaming overhead. His ears as red-and-white as candy canes. His forehead a burning slab in the knife-edged wind, tears streaming from his eyes.

Hell’s Yells’ practices were already drawing a crowd. Kids congregated at the foot of the fire escape; after the Roxy staff switched off the marquee lights, Louie Louie lowered the metal stairs and let them climb up. They occupied the first three rows, and watched the boys work out the kinks in their act.

If you could call it that. For an act requires some planned co-ordination between performers, plus some articulated sense of purpose. Robbie hadn’t wanted to rehearse at all – he believed that spontaneity, uncertainty, and violent instability were the keys to their success. It irritated him that Brat and Louie Louie were so stuck on conventional concepts of music, like playing together. More than anything, he told them, Hell’s Yells demanded stamina. Hell’s Yells was a protest against blind tradition and pointless subtlety and pretentious technique. There should be no lyrics to learn, no songs as such, nothing you could call a rhythm – only a furnace blast of heat and energy, gunning from point A to point B, a music to end all musics, a meltdown of music-less particles, a riot of negative ions,
anti
-music.

He roared and leapt and raged and mooned the crowd, but when all they did was sit lisdessly, watching, and not taking part, he had to figure he wasn’t giving enough. He attacked the front row and sat on the lap of a fan and pulled her shirt up to bare her breasts, and when her boyfriend just laughed and didn’t try to stop him, he knew he really wasn’t giving enough. He whipped an empty bottle at their heads, and when a barrage of litter didn’t come hurding back out of the darkness, he shouted
“No fucken
IDOLS
,”
and shot himself in the head with an aerosol spray can. “Don’t believe a word I say!” Black paint streaming from his ear, he yanked them out of their seats and wrote, one letter per cushion,

and when all they did was cheer him on, he knew there was still a lot of work to be done.

One advantage of having the Roxy for a practice space was that the band could fuel itself with junk food; Brat broke open the office door with a credit card, and there Robbie found the key to the candy counter. Night after night they gorged themselves on chocolate bars and cold popcorn and flat pop, crashing at dawn to sleep off the rawest stomachs. Problem was, Robbie soon developed a bad case of diarrhea, and found he’d have to supplement his diet in some way. His parents had given him a heap of tinned supplies when he first set out, but that had been exhausted in no time, and he was amazed at how quickly food can become a person’s paramount concern; world domination by Hell’s Yells was going to take a little while longer, he could face up to that, but he needed food now. At home he made stewy tea and re-used his teabags. He boiled spaghetti and ate it without butter or oil. And he mooched like mad: Monday night, Louie Louie’s for a
feast of processed meat and cheese-food product, layered between damp slabs of white bread; Tuesday night, Rosie came over and did her best to impress him with a desiccated slice of veal, topped with withered onion shreds and gluey corn niblets drowned in maple syrup; Wednesday night, he went with her to L’Enfer Strip and got free beers; Thursday the same; Friday night he got shit-faced again and did a whole lot of her diet pills and repeated a joke he had heard from a bloody-minded Dublin punk group that was climbing the charts at the time: What’s an Irish seven-course meal? A potato and a six-pack of Guinness, arf arf; Saturday night he was back at the club; and on Sunday night, Brat’s mother fed him his only nourishment for the week: vegetarian chili, unchafed wheat bread on the side, pineapple juice, and bran cakes with boysenberry cream, which sent him farting happily home.

Hunger makes a person keen. His senses became sharpened, his judgement quicker, his vision polished; no mirror above the aisle of Wu’s grocery store was convex enough to reflect him, none of Mr. Wu’s sons were fast enough to catch him. That was also because he was fuelled with benzedrine. Crackling like a spark plug, eyes in the back of his head. He was bristling, with eyes like rearview mirrors on a Vespa, and a good mod one, as anyone knows, has more mirrors on it than arms on a head-shop Shiva. He wore his mod parka – it had so many handy giant pockets it was like a green canvas kitchenette. Meat here, in flat frozen slabs; thin packets there, of Jell-O, soup-in-a-mug, chocolate, diet pills.

Brat showed him some Dine ’n’ Dash scams, one of which went like this: they order two
souvlakis
all-dressed,
K
, two
doner kebabs
with spicy sauce, two
gyros
, and four Molson. Under the seat, in a footprint of iced sludge, Brat surreptitiously drops a wallet – a real cheap plastic one, courtesy of Lovely Things Inc. – with Mounties on it. It’s stuffed with old bus transfers and a couple of dollars conspicuously sticking out. After they scarf
their meal, Robbie makes a big deal about having found this wallet on the floor. He asks some good folks at the adjacent booth if it’s theirs. At first they look fearfully at him – he’s all hammer-and-nails – but he’s very very nice and says, “Well, I’m going to return this at the cash, eh, but there’s only a couple of dollars in it, which they might think is – I mean, who carries just a couple of dollars, in a nice wallet like this, and take a look at me, it’s not as if I’m always trusted! So, when I tell the cashier about it, would you just wave to say I’m telling the truth? Oh, thank you. You’re very kind.” Then Robbie and Brat go to the cash and point to the nice folks and say to the cashier, “We found this wallet. And see those people there, they’re paying for us,
OK?”
Go ahead. Try it sometime.

“FULL SCAM AHEAD
!” Brat said, as they snowplowed up the street. “Oh, and by the way, I’ve got something for you.” From his jacket, he pulled a rolled-up T-shirt, black with white lettering on it. He unfurled it. Robbie stamped and blew breath into the bowl of his hands and, sucking the tang of onions from the walls of his cheeks, read,

“Cool, eh? I got it done specially for you at my Dad’s factory. He says he likes it so much he’ll put out a line of Lovely T-Shirts with messages about social injustice on them. I had another idea, too, a novelty, eh – tin cans that’ll supposedly contain
authentic
FRESH AIR
from the Canadian Rockies. Pay off is, he’s gonna
make me director of the division next year. Anyway, you better wear it, man. I can’t always bail you out when you get in trouble.”

That night Robbie went to L’Enfer Strip again, mainly to bum burgers and brews, but also because he always sort of hoped Ivy would show. Or at least it was only a matter of time before Olly turned up, and when he did, Robbie would screw up his courage and ask him.

At the adjacent table, three black guys in pinstripe suits the colour of chocolate milk were taking in a gloomy dancer on their table top. “Yeah,
BABY
! Show us some
TRIM
! Give us some fair-haired
PUSSY PIE
!” The dancer, Florida-tanned, was listlessly thrusting her white bottom at the guys’ faces. They resembled dogs sniffing. Robbie watched her face and, with a lurch in his stomach, saw her lips were horribly swollen, as if she had been drinking boiling water.

He visited the cramped dressing room, where Rosie allowed him to sit against the wall at the back. She was pulling on a black-lace clerical collar she’d made to match her brassiere. Robbie sat, feeling supercool with his spiky hair, shredded black bondage pants, Lovely T-shirt with the sleeves torn off, and studded dog collar like Mendoza used to wear.

“Hi’m not so sure e should be ere,” said gloomy Dolores. She was stark naked but for a cigarette in her mouth and stilettoes on her feet. She wore her eyeliner like rings under a raccoon’s eyes, which made her look woebegone; she also had a way of facing the floor when she sucked on her cigarette, and looking up at the same time, half submissively and half suspiciously.

“S’OK Dolores,” Rosie said. “He’s quiet and gentle.”

“Quais
, dat’s de kind dat worry me de mos,” Dolores said. “De ones who can’t look you in de face.” Making a glum and sarcastic
moue
at Robbie, who looked down. He dug his fingers into
his plate
oí pontine
and slouched, doing all he could to feign nonchalance, as Dolores cupped her startlingly white breasts in her hands to glue a gold star on each nipple.

After she’d left the room, Rosie said, “I saw you stare, Bob, but don’t go getting a crush on her. She’s not your type. She’s not
happy
, she’s doomed to be one of those victims of society, some people just are. Like Little Miss
You-Know-Who
. I’ll tell you how bitter Dolores is – she got herpes on her lip from a guy, right, one of the Dead Man’s Hands, so what she does now is, if anyone in the club is being an animal, she kisses the lips of the beer bottles before she serves them. Gross, eh, but in a way I don’t blame her; I mean, we’re talking rapism and gynocide. We’re fighting in the trenches, anything goes. It’s like,
OK
you guys, your two thousand years are
UP!”