Kicking Tomorrow (3 page)

He rifled through Dad’s desk (
him too –
envelopes, pens, and keys arranged in incredibly devious asymmetries) and plundered the pockets of a pair of big elephant-brown baggy-ass pants that lay in a trampled mound at the foot of the bed, thinking all the while that at the end of this energetic day you could hardly accuse him of a lack of
curiosity
, not knowing what his old man did. Exactly. It was plainly that: the Generation Gap being what it was in the mid 1970s, communication at home was as rare, as slim, as
bogarted
(in his expert estimation), as a joint rolled with prime Hawaiian hay. The end. All parents must die.

FOLLOWING MORNING, AFTER HIS SHOWER, HE STOOD IN
front of the mirror and swabbed a patch clear. His hair was kite string tangled in a tree. His body plump-white and muscleless as a larva. And pizza-face, gross himself out. He leaned close, nose to the glass, nose to nose, chin to chin. And weird, eh, how elsewhere the universe was spiralling vastly, crackling with energy, and elsewhere the planet was busting apart with political crises and unnameable emotional traumas, and here his world had shrunk down, like a dwarf star collapsing in on itself, to his concern for this one little disgusting pimple. And so suicide was out of the question this week, for sure. Die young but leave a beautiful corpse, remember that.

He squeezed himself into his bell-bottoms, squirmed around, doing knee bends, tiptoeing, till his cock and balls were reunited to one side like a squishy packet of Gummi Bears. Pulled on a paisley headband, a belt buckled with a Harley-Davidson eagle, plus his authentic Canadian regiment D-Day combat jacket with the red curtain fringes sewn on the cuffs and the Ban-the-Bomb patch on the back. He selected a T-shirt that bore an image of Keef Richards of the Strolling Bones, a photo taken just minutes
before he’d died of a mysterious brain haemorrhage. (Or so it was rumoured; Robbie’d heard it otherwise said that the singer had injected himself with a horsecock-needleful of crystal meth, diluting it with water drawn up from a toilet bowl, and that he’d been careless – for apparently, Spit Swagger, the group’s drummer, had just thrown up in the same toilet, and Keef had neglected to flush it before dipping the syringe in. Robbie had yet to verify the truth of either story.) The image had been printed on a film of sticky plastic and ironed on at the Prairie Buffalo T-Shirt Emporium and Head Shoppe, in the Alexis Nihon Plaza. After three washes the cheap shit was already breaking up, but Robbie preferred it like that; the chips reminded him of the way oil paintings and frescoes crack apart after a century or two, and they invested Keef’s portrait with the decadence and intrigue associated with historical decline. Keef’s imperially bored expression registered no surprise at his own head exploding: the Twentieth Century Schizoid Man had kept his cool to the end. And there was a caption:

over which Robbie had scrawled, in fat black Magic Marker,

“Oh. You look extremely
GROOVY
,” Rosie told him when she showed to pick him up. (Apparently, they’d made a plan – out on the lawn of the Church of St. Anthony – though he was fucked if he could remember what for, exactly.) He shot her back a nasty stare. He knew it wasn’t in her nature to be sarcastic, but just to be sure.

Down in the dungeon they shared a beer. “I like this place,” she said, looking around. “It’s a living
womb.”
She curled a strand of hair around her index finger, thoughtfully. “I can never trust men, I’ve decided.” Tucking the hair behind one ear.

“Yeah,” Robbie replied, good-naturedly, for he knew she couldn’t be thinking of him; he, Robbie the Gallant, exempt from the company of Men Women Don’t Trust.

“Like for instance, you should have
called
me. We had a good time in the winter,
I
thought. What if I hadn’t never bumped into you yesterday?” Slipping a hand between her thighs, looking at the ceiling. “Boys smell like fast food, I think, which is too bad.…” Squinting at the marijuana leaf flag. “Anyway I’ve decided I’ll give myself a gin abortion if I have to. But I have to say I would still want the baby. In
principle.”
And opening them unself-consciously wide.

“Chrissake,” Robbie said. “What happened?”

“Oh, mellow out, Bob.” Clamping them shut. “Give me my space will you? Nothing happened. I’m just saying
if
. I mean, every time I’m alone with my boss he’s all over me. And, ouch, he’s so ROUGH. Here I am – delicate little Rose. Five-foot-six, forlorn, circulation cut off by pantyhose invented by men.”

“Rosie, uh. Maybe the way you – maybe you, sort of, lead him on.”

“Oh yeah, typical –
see no evil
…” she snapped, clacking her gum angrily at him now. “You and he and my Daddy would get along like
houses
on fire. I don’t LEAD the guy on. He doesn’t
need
to be led on.” Then she crossed her legs with what Robbie took as an expression of finality. And uncrossed them again.

It was June 24th, she reminded him – St. Jean-Baptiste, Quebec’s Fête Nationale. So they took a Boulevard bus to Côte-des-Neiges and walked from there, high up to Beaver Lake, where
Mount Royal’s southern plateau looked over the city and – on days when the wind blew the haze away – all the way to the St. Lawrence River.

Robbie, who liked to sit right in front of the amplifiers, was stunned with disappointment to see how many people had got there before him. He staked out a little territory, as much as Rosie’s beach blanket would cover, somewhere in the centre of the anthill of humanity that bristled with flags and waving arms, and soon they were both lying beneath a big sky getting a buzz off a bottle of fizzing warm apple cider.

All over the mountain, while the music played, children tugged on kites and families perspired around barbecues; French-Canadian hippies handed out political pamphlets and flags with fleurs-de-lis on them, mimes in whiteface did their utterly compelling act of standing still or being stuck inside glass boxes – the only whiff of violence (apart from the fact that the music was so loud fish were floating up dead on the surface of the lake) was a story that circulated in the crowd about an incident involving the Montreal chapter of the Satan’s Choice and their arch rivals the Dead Man’s Hands, over a cocaine deal. Another story had it that several of the bikers had gang-banged a teenage girl in the bushes, on the east side of the mountain under the giant electric crucifix. But there was so much peace and love and music and political fervour in the air that no one was about to get het up over a little thing like that.

Robbie lay on his back watching smoke curl lazily upwards, listening to the music performed on a stage half a mile away, and thinking about how the word humanity has the word ant in it. The earth was a vast dish tipping, revolving vertiginously in a luminous universe, the centrifuge pulling him around like a great, lethargic fairground ride. He could barely see the stage at all, but there was so much sweet metal music spilling out from the banks
of speakers, like a drawerful of cutlery crashing to the floor, that his skull was numb, and there was still enough noise left over to smack against the rows of houses at the edges of the park and bounce right back again.

He tried to estimate how many people were there. It was certainly the biggest crowd he’d ever been in. Maybe even bigger than Woodstock!

“A PARTIR D’ICI ET POUR UN AN!”
the immensely popular Yvon Deschamps dictated into the microphone, his arms outstretched.

“A PARTIR D’ICI ET POUR UN AN!”
the crowd responded as one massive, joyous voice from all over Mount Royal.

“J’vais pas parler Anglais!”

“J
’VAIS PAS PARLER ANGLAIS!”

“Dey’re not gonna speak Hinglish because dey don’t know
ow
to speak Hinglish,” Robbie chuckled to himself, splitting a match down the middle to make a flimsy roach-clip.

Rosie squinted around and whistled low. “You know what, Bob? There’s a
renaissance
going on here. The best and heaviest music in North America, the best and heaviest
BOOKS
, the best
ART
, the heaviest
POLITICS
. It’s crazy, but right now there’s a genuine
revolution
happening, and no one in the outside world even knows about it.”

“The best and heaviest dope,” Robbie murmured.

Politics was not his strong point, but as far as he dug it, Quebec separatism went like this: the
pea-soups
had had it up to here with being bossed around by the
Anglos
, who had all the money and the culture and the smarts. It was Dad who called them pea-soups, because that was their national dish, but to Robbie’s generation they
were pepsis –
that’s because, and Robbie was sure he had read this in a scientific magazine, the average Québécois drinks eighteen gallons of pop a year; that’s tops in Canada and second only to certain southern U.S. states. Anyway,
now the pepsis wanted a spot guaranteed on the hit parade, and in their own language; they’d tried bombings and kidnappings before, but today a whole lot of pepsis felt the only way to be was out of Canada altogether.

That was it, in a nutshell. Robbie meanwhile is preoccupied with working enough spittle up in his dried-out mouth to moisten the end of an enormous spliff before the glowing tip falls off and burns Rosie’s back. And Rosie meanwhile has pulled a copy of
The Compleat Illustrated Handbook on the Psychic Sciences
from her beachbag.

She rolls over, shows him. “Palmistry, astrology, dice-divination, cartomancy, moleosophy, dream interpretation, telepathy
and
ESP
, graphology, yoga, and omens.”

“Moleosophy?”

“The study of moles and their meaning. I have one on the aureole of my left nipple. Look, see?” Robbie looks. “It means I’m an active, energetic person. Want to meditate?”

He shrugs. Can’t hurt. Rosie whispers to him his confidential personal mantra, cupping her hand to his ear
– forrum –
and shows him the lotus position.…

He has trouble concentrating. Not just because he’s stoned, and not because he’s at a rock concert; it’s just that the benefit of repeating a Sanskrit word over and over in his head and picturing nothing but a white screen, utter nothingness, for twenty minutes, frankly eludes him. Dad would probably laugh that it shouldn’t be such an impossible task for Robbie of all people, but he’d never appreciate the real problem: Robbie’s Sanskrit word sounds too much like the
Montreal
Forum, and Yvan Cournoyer and the Canadiens keep skating in to push a puck around and score on the power play. In his mind Robbie calls an end to the period and brings on the Zamboni to clear the ice of tuques and ice-cream wrappers and frozen spit, in slow ovals, and fill his
mind again with utter white. But it’s futile. He opens his eyes a fraction and peeps over at Rosie. She’s sitting with an upright back and her fingers poised, her eyes wide open, vicariously enjoying his perfect transcendence.…

“Good try!” she says. “Now gimme your palm. Boy, I’m reading
everything
these days. Tea leaves, toenails, bus transfers, toast. Fate leaves fingerprints all
over
the place.”

Everything except intelligent books, thinks Robbie the Big Reader, rolling his eyes. He knows Rosie wants his palm only to make physical contact with him, and her extreme eagerness makes him retreat farther. Though in the end his curiosity wins out.

“Ivy?” Rosie says. “Lemme see. Hmm. No, I don’t think so. I don’t see her in your future at all.”

He pulls away, wipes the damp on his jeans.

Rosie shrugs, then crosses her arms to pull off her tank-top; points her toes in the air, and slips off her tights. Then she stretches out on her belly beside him in a minuscule black bikini, closes her eyes, and demands he oil her all over.

“I’m so short-sighted I can’t see the stage anyway,” she says. “You can give me the play-by-play while I listen.”

How cheap and greasy mascara looks in the bright sun, he thinks. He examines her body, sees how her curves are traced with swirling trails of hair – not dyed black like the hair on her head, but gold as a bumblebee – on her cheeks, on her arms, down her back too. Her shoulder blades like wings. Her wasp waist. The startling rise of her rump and the tantalizing shadow where her bikini-bottom spans the valley; her golden down disappearing there like a pollinated path.

He looks up to see a couple of guys, hairy as buffalo, ogling her too. He gives them a defiant look, like: Bug off, this is
MY
queen bee. Pours a palmful of baby oil on her back, and works it in. Rosie reaching back with one arm and deftly unhooking her
bra. But after Robbie sees them turn away, he thumbs her flesh without enthusiasm again. He’s really saving himself for Ivy. Just because Rosie and he made out last winter in an episode he’d rather not dwell on right now thank you very much, doesn’t mean he’s
committing
himself, exactly.

Soon he’s aware of her standing up. He hears her voice, up in the clouds, saying she’s going in search of a Johnny-on-the-Spot. He watches her buzz off as he remains cross-legged on the beach towel, his fizzing warm bottle between his thighs, all pumped up as happy and buoyant as a multicoloured hot-air balloon.