Kicking Tomorrow (33 page)

Now his stomach’s filling up again. It’s such an unfamiliar sick feeling; you normally associate nausea with hot acids and a lumpy puddle, but now his belly feels chilled, and the vomit that leaps forth is smooth as paste and doesn’t burn – not like in
The Exorcist
, he thinks, humour being the only way he’s going to handle this little nightmare – but the second wave looks more familiar:
oh hello
, there are the Big Macs and the fries, there’s the frothy beer, and there, like buoys bobbing in the swill of a
harbour, are the pills. Well, thank God, he thinks, at least that’s all over. But he’s wrong. They fill his stomach and make him vomit, spectacularly, twice more before they pull out the tube and leave him soaking in his own vile juices, panting for breath, stinking, and feeling like those cows he’s read about in the early days of seafaring, who got so sick they disembowelled themselves bringing up all seven of their stomachs right there on the deck.…

He was discharged around eleven that night. Rosie had waited the whole time, so they walked along the Boulevard together, arms linked, past the dark Westmount mansions. His stomach gurgled clammily. The night was mild; unnaturally so. A ceiling of fog lay under the sky, bright as day as it reflected the lights of the steaming city. He thought of all the observatories in the world, whose once crystal view of the universe was now obscured, as urban grids expanded round the globe. And way beyond, piercing the mist, the docks and the bridges and the Expo ’67 site sparkled across the St. Lawrence River, the solid-state city glowing in between, holding out the promise of a better year, a life worth enduring – maybe.

After a considerate half-hour of walking in silence, Rosie said, “So, why’d you do such a crazy thing, Bob? Not over that strange little stray cat, I hope.”

Embarrassed, Robbie nodded.

“Wow. Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’ve seen her at the club a few times, eh, ’n there’s heavy guys hanging out there who I wouldn’t cross, but she’s all over them like a dirty shirt. Is she ever a
minx!
Leaves ’em with blue balls half the time, ’n she can get away with it, too, cos of who her brother is. She told you she almost went to juvenile court last summer on
assault
charges, right?”

“Uh no-o, not exactly.…”

“I heard about it cos the kid she almost tore out the eyes of is always bugging the Dead Man’s Hands to be a conscript, or what do they call ’em, a
prospect
, and he sort of hangs around the club. Or at least he used to, haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks now. He’s quite the slime himself but still, like normal human beings, even he has parents ’n
they
were going to press charges, eh, until Olly paid them a polite visit.”

“Yeah, well, Ivy and Gaston deserve each other is all I can say.”

They stopped at the Lookout to take the city in, the wind blowing through the bare trees of the bird sanctuary behind them. The blood-red lights of late-night traffic streamed away intermittently along the Ville-Marie Expressway, distant enough to be silent, not to wake the rich residents here. Closer, a car’s tire crunched as it rolled over a ball of gritty ice, and popped it, skittering, into a gutter. Two dogs did the midnight yelp. Robbie gritted his teeth tight together, breathed resolutely through his nose. Rosie rested her head on his shoulder and her hair went up his nostrils like spikes of fragrant grass. He pecked her forehead with his lips. She looked up at him, lifted her chin, and they kissed. And while they kissed, tentatively, tenderly, he listened to the heavy tide of sorrow roll up, roll up, roll up repeatedly, like a record stuck in its final groove, from his heart to his bruising head.

WHEN ROBBIE DESCRIBED THE GRISSOMS TO ROSIE, SHE HAD
a simple solution: “Make
peace!
Let them get to know what a sweet guy you are, Bob. Share your vision of the
WORLD
with them. I’m sure even they were
young
once too!”

One more beer, then, and a joint for good luck, and they left Dolores to play records and be gloomy on her own. Downstairs, Mrs. Grissom answered the door, her husband behind her. They looked surprised at first, but Rosie was so effervescent they closed the door only to slip off the security chain, and welcomed them in. Both Mr. and Mrs. had white beards, and mottled onionskin stretched over their skulls. Mrs. Grissom had white powder caked on her face that stopped at her chin; the neck that hung in folds below was naked. She had pencilled an almost continuous straight line across her forehead where her eyebrows had been, or a little higher, maybe, and Robbie was struck with the impression that wherever she looked, whomever she addressed, she was waiting, querulously, for answers to questions she’d been asking all her life.

“Nice walkway, these days,” she said, and Robbie stiffened, radar tuned to the sarcasm frequency.

Old people – he’d known a couple: Grandma Bethel and her sister, Dinah. Robbie’s considered opinion was that, being from
the old country as they were (though he couldn’t tell you
which
old country)… well, forget it, you don’t need to hear what his considered opinion was, you can guess. On sweltering afternoons, anyway, Grandma Bethel liked to wear pillowy bloomers with Canadian geese migrating across them, and Great Aunt Dinah had a taste for jewel-encrusted horn-rimmed spectacles. To slobber over Barnabus, they both had to painfully bend their bowed legs with the thick nylons rolled down about the ankles. Barnabus making a wiggly mouth and bursting into tears, and Miriam and Robbie just killing themselves at that.

“Look, Bob!” Rosie exclaimed, while Mrs. Grissom went to fetch them a glass of sherry, and Mr. Grissom lowered himself into a tatty overstuffed chair. “Look at
this.”
On the mantelpiece were numerous photographs in ornate silver frames. Eons old, from before the war: Mr. Grissom looking sharp, with Brylcreemed hair and a smart mustachio, plunging through the air, with his heels tucked under and pointed behind him like a couple of exhaust pipes. Robbie whistled with admiration. And here was Mrs. Grissom, posing proudly in a sequinned muu-muu, with a headdress of rhinestones and ostrich feathers, and standing
topless
in one, with one bare thigh thrust forward (not at all the leg she has now, Robbie notes uncomfortably, with the varicose veins like mould in Stilton). Her eyelashes were clotted black, her face was creaseless and shiny with luminescent lipstick.

“The inscription says,
Empire Burlesque Follies of Montreal,”
Rosie said.

“Yeah, I know,” Robbie said. He’d made the connection quickly, impressed, suddenly sorry he’d hated them all this time for just being old. “Jacquie Diamantine, and Marcello ‘Red’ Manzoli, of the Flying Manzoli Brothers. They were famous in their time, eh.”

“You
know
these people?” Rosie said.

“You got it, young fella,” Mr. Grissom said, getting up again with difficulty. “Direct from the Lido Cabaret.” Robbie observed
that his long lanky body moved as stiffly as an old deck chair now, taut-hinged, hauled out from the shed when the winter’s done.

“This was your
job?”
Robbie said, meaning to compliment the old man, but thanks to his indelibly mean little gunslinger eyes, and his habitually sharpened tone of voice – plus, now, his punked-up haircut that looked like a wig of nails – the remark came out as a taunt, and right on cue an almighty noise started like a chainsaw through the ceiling. The Grissom’s chandelier rattled, and knicknacks walked across the shelves.

“I’d like to see you try it,” Mrs. Grissom shouted. “I’d say you have trouble just jumping out of bed – only reason the ass of your jeans is worn out is, you sit on it all day.” The old lady started it, remember that. “You are a noisy little bugger, ain’t you?”

“Free country,” Robbie retorted.

Rosie tugged at Robbie’s sleeve. “Why don’t you ask Dolores to turn it down, Bob? That would be the
nice
thing to do.”

“Don’t get a wedgie over it,” Robbie said. “I guess it’s just not your kind of music. Free country.”

“C’mon, Bob, let’s go. You’re wasted.”

Mr. Grissom’s face was shaking. His eyeballs swivelled in their sockets. “I can’t hear myself think,” he said.

“That’s cause you’re hard of hearing,” Robbie sneered.

“Go to hell, you filthy young creep,” Mrs. Grissom said.

Robbie struggled to undo the half-dozen locks on the front door, flew out leaving it open.

Rosie called out, “Bob, wait!” but he was going going gone.

He stomped away, kicking fences, Robbie the marauding knight, swinging his fists at bare bushes, heading for the Roxy. The first heavy snow of the year was drifting down out of the darkness, teeming in the light of the streetlamps. It was accumulating on staircases all down the street, all over this free country; it was collecting on windowsills, and the windshields of parked
cars; it was gathering in the bark of trees and on the handles of trashcans and in the folds of scraps of litter huddled against the curb; and, as it melted on Robbie’s hot head it made his ferocious spiky hair go all limp.

Next morning, still charged, he’s tilting homewards with a bleeding throat and a whole new fan on his lap, riding with her in the back of Louie Louie’s Oldsmobile Cutlass, with the back hiked up high over mag wheels, furry dice hanging from the rearview, 8-track, and fuzzy plastic bobbing-head doggie in the back. The car filling up with dope smoke just like in a Cheech and Chong skit. Robbie and Brat laugh about the stupid broads who take them seriously enough to get in the sack with them just like that. It’s hilarious: three Joes, K, just three fucken nimrods throw together a band, hack their way through some so-called songs, and in two weeks, look what happens.

“I got a Lovely souvenir streetmap of Montreal,” Brat says. “I put it on my bedroom wall and stuck little flags on it. Green ones is where I got laid, red ones is where the chick comes from.”

“Uff. Uff uff,” goes Louie Louie, punching the roof of the car.

“You throw a party, right,” Robbie guffaws, “and invite all the chicks you balled,” exhaling, and passing the joint to the fan. “They show, and they’re checking each other out the way chicks do, and you say, Well, I guess you’re all wondering why I invited you here tonight.”

Ironical thing is, he’s actually going off sex. The boys drop him off, and soon he’s back in his bed with the fan (relieved that Rosie and Dolores appear to have crashed chez Bill the Beast for the night), his tongue beneath the hood of her love button, one finger up her honeypot, another in her asshole, when he realizes he’s bummed out. Weird, eh? He just feels like an animal, humping
in the age-old tradition – millions of years of it, what a bore. Sex, he decides, is definitely an old-fashioned concept. Anyway, it’s hard to concentrate on sex when he’s so completely wasted – the air is buzzing flies in his eyes and ears – and she’s taking so long he thinks his tongue will fall out at the roots. He can’t remember the last time he’s enjoyed doing this, if ever. He periscopes up over her belly. The muscles of her abdomen are heaving happily, and now she lets out a vaginal fart. He crawls up and bites her neck, as hard as he can. Now she’s really alive, digging into his back and nipping back. He bites her again, on the lips, hard, and draws blood. He looks down to where his penis is beached like a soft eel on her shorebelly. A wave of nausea washes over him as his stomach brings up a solution of fizz and that oily stuff they have the nerve to call popcorn
butter
. He and the fan look at each other, nose to nose. She makes a quizzical expression. This is a drag, he thinks, and pushes his face into the pillow. She sits up and wipes the blood with the back of her hand. He feels bad, but turfs her out, anyway – nicely enough, telling her that it serves her right if she refused to listen to his dire warnings about star power. She leaves with her clothes in her arms. He holds his head above his pillow and waits for the front door to slam. Then he hauls out his secret pile of magazines from beneath the mattress, pores over them, licks Kiki Van’s glossy pussy, and rolls over into a boiling sleep.…

All of this time, he didn’t miss the family one bit. Had he heard from them? Of course not. Dad would have spouted some bromide about a son returning only when he’s ready; and Mom would insist that, unlike other mothers, she would never bother him on the phone or embarrass him by turning up at his door
unannounced. (In truth, she couldn’t phone if she wanted to, because Robbie’s phone was dead; earlier that week, a woman with a voice like rusted iron filings had grated in his ear that he had twenty-four hours to pay his bill, which was two months overdue already, or he’d be disconnected. Robbie saved her the trouble and yanked the cord from the wall.)

It was a good thing Mom had started sending him care packages, though. Robbie hungrily ripped the first one open as soon as it arrived. He found sesame seeds, turtle soup stock,
loukhoums
imported from the Middle East, iron pills, seaweed. And a miracle hangover cure in her racing handwriting: