Kicking Tomorrow (29 page)

Robbie reached forward to give her shoulder a friendly squeeze, but when she purred and held his hand fast for an extended back rub, he was suddenly put off. Why did she have to behave so needily? It was irritating.
Always
the tense shoulders – for what reason, he wondered angrily, considering the easy life she led? This had become a duty, not a pleasure. His arms itched unpleasantly. He withdrew. Picked up a book from the counter, opened it, and frowned.
Wimmyn In Herstory
, two thirds of it underlined in pencil.

“What’s all this, Rosie?”

“So I can go back to the interesting bits, of course.”

“But –” He leafed through. Page after page, entire passages, paragraphs, pages, meticulously underlined.

“Oh, forget it,” she said, “you wouldn’t understand.”

She fussed with her lacy push-up bra, her nipples erect, he slyly noticed, served up now like a couple of juicy plums. She caught his gaze in the mirror. “Cos it’s
cold
in here, in case you haven’t noticed. Silicone’s bad enough in wintertime, but
OUCH
do my boobs ever
HURT
when I’m about to have my period.”

“Boobs,” Robbie said, by way of apology. Trying out consideration like an ill-fitting pair of pants. “Ugly word. Makes them sound like – I dunno – mistakes.”

“Sometimes I think they
are,”
she replied mournfully, and got up to go take her clothes off all over again.

“Ladies and
GENNEL
men, once again please welcome veuillez réclamer de loverly la
CHAR
mante…”

Rosie had added a kink to her striptease: in between articles of clothing, now she read passages from the Bible into a microphone –
Classics of Misogyny
, as she introduced them:
“I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men,”
she intoned gravely, pulling down a stocking from under her frock.
“She is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor
I Timothy 2: 10-14.”

In Robbie’s humble opinion, this was a bit much. Well, it was boring. Who in their right mind comes to a strip club for Bible class? Rosie tossed a frilly garter belt to the front of the stage and read,
“As the Church is subject to Christ, so let wives be subject in everything to their husbands
. Ephesians 5: 23-24.”

A man in a grey raincoat stood up, blocking Robbie’s view. He seemed to be whispering to Rosie, for she was leaning towards him over the lip of the stage. What was he doing, slipping money into her panties? Maybe not. For now Rosie had her distressed face on, apparently looking around for help. Then the man in the raincoat grabbed her shoulders, and nearly pulled her off the stage, lappets flapping. The music was loud, but you could hear her shriek. Several bouncers rushed over, grabbed the man, roughly and efficiently, and ushered him out of the club.

Slouched in the rear of the club under the placard of rules, with his belly full of greaseburgers, poutine, and seven-odd
beers, Robbie takes it all in.
Interesting
. No one pesters him to buy overpriced beers here – he’s been on nodding terms with the bouncers since Rosie cleared him. From this perspective, he can eyeball a dozen girls at one time, not unlike the women in those old paintings featuring harems or hell or catastrophes befalling all of mankind. He pictures them bound and helpless, some being ravished by Romans, others devoured by monsters. He thinks, my harem. Yeah. Weren’t there famous French painters who did tender portraits of the whores in Paris? One day he’ll bring a sketch pad in here, too. He could easily be famous too, if he just got around to it.

After Chastity Church is done, Robbie, Cruel Lord of the Concubines, drunkenly reclines to watch an overweight stripper do her aerobic number: dimples in her buttocks, boobs just one more fold of flesh above her belly as she bends to disentangle her panties from a heel. She’s performing ludicrously unerotic contortions; touches her toes with her arse presented to the tiny crowd like a pummelled face, clumsily does the splits and lands with a bump, lies on her back like a stranded beetle and grabs her ankles, all with the enthusiasm of a beast at the circus. And Robbie despises her for it.…

Sometime later, Rosie’s at his side. He looks at her blurrily. Her underwear’s stuffed with paper money, like a costume at a Caribbean carnival. Her temples and upper lip are glistening, her eyes gently searching his.

“Robbie, are you all right? You look
OUT
of it. Boy, did you catch that
weirdo?
Know what he gave me? A pamphlet, look
–JESUS LOVES EVERYBODY
. He said I was a fornicator and a blasphemer. Well, at least
SOME
one’s taking me seriously! Oh, and guess
what
, we’re taking care of Dolores tonight. Did I tell you she recently had a baby but she gave it away? Last week her old man threatened to
eat
it or something. I would of taken it off her,
eh, but the adoption people said I wasn’t any more suitable a mother than she was. What’re they looking for anyway, the Virgin Mary?”

On Ste-Catherine the three of them walk with their heads down against the wind, the butt of Dolores’ cigarette flaring brilliantly in the gusts. Rosie wraps one half of her fur coat around Robbie’s shoulders and tries to button the front around the both of them. Robbie shrugs her off roughly, and goes to pee against a wall. After he’s shivered and turned around he sees he’s attracted quite a crowd. What, have people never seen spiky purple hair, or what? Feeling reckless and mean, and knowing he looks like he’s stuck his cock in an electric socket, he jabs the middle finger of one hand at them and makes the other hand into a livid codpiece.

“Chrisse,”
Dolores says, grimacing against the wind. “Soon as I make henough money – pas compliqué, chus partie en Floride.” And singing that old Charlebois number,
“Sur Québec Air, Transworld, Northern, Eastern, Western – pi Pan American.”

Two blocks on, something moves in an alley. Just as Robbie notices him, he steps forward with a groan, his raincoat flapping like a raven’s wings.

“Blasphemer! Fornicator!”

Rosie jumps, grabs Robbie’s arm again, and grips it tight.

“Oh ayy, bisse mon cul,” Dolores spits.

“Yeah,” Rosie says. “Get outta my life, you weirdo.”

“Prostitute!”
the man hisses.

“Weirdo!” Rosie says. “Captain of the Raincoat Brigade!”

“Jesus loves everybody!” Robbie calls out merrily (he’s bobbing and weaving around, above it all somehow, witnessing the whole scene as if through a glass-bottomed boat), and pulls the girls down the street on his arms.

“Devil’s gateway! Demons suck your body! How easily you destroyed man, the image of God!”

They scoot away, turn a corner, until the rasping’s out of earshot. “Weirdo,” Rosie says, and shivers vigorously.

By the time they arrived home, Robbie hopping from car roof to roof (enjoying the percussive pop they made when he jumped off), it was past three, but Mrs. Grissom had her face pressed to the glass of her front room, forehead and cheeks illuminated in the lamplight. She rapped on the glass and shook her fist and shouted. They heard locks unbolting as they approached. She wrenched the door open, and winked darkly.

“You’re quite a hit with the ladies,” she said. “Ain’t you.”

Rosie and Dolores shrieked with laughter, but Robbie wasn’t so amused – he was noticing the garbage bags he’d taken out earlier that day had been slashed. It couldn’t have been an animal, because other people’s bags were untouched, while junk-mail envelopes with his address clearly marked on them had slipped into the muddy snow; and to his dismay, the colourful, lurid, incriminating pages of several
Bosom Buddies
magazines. While Rosie and Dolores climbed the stairs, he gathered the messy bunch of tits and bums in soggy wrinkled wads, and rammed them into a trashcan.

Rosie poured a bath, and whipped up heaps of bubbles with an egg-beater. Dolores sat on the bathtub rim, smoking and looking spiritless. She had taken her shirt off and was clutching it to her breasts. One thing about strippers, Robbie observed smiling, they’re modest when it comes to their civvies.

“You’re in a good mood,” Rosie said. “Well, don’t cream your jeans – this bath ain’t big enough for the
three
of us.”

“I know, I know,” Robbie said. His stomach a sunken tub of disappointment. He went to put on an Environments record: a lapping lagoon with chirruping insects and a distant mackaw. He lit some incense to cover up the smell of burning vinyl that
emanated from the kitchen, carried several candles into the bathroom, and sat on the lowered toilet seat. Drifts of bubbles glimmered on Dolores’ shoulders and breasts where Rosie had playfully scooped them up, but she was looking gloomy again, and when she drew strenuously on her doused and soapy cigarette, vertical lines appeared on her upper lip as if she had been developing muscles there from years of applied smoking.

Robbie’s thinking, Cool, this is like a
magazine
. Dolores’ erect brown nipples. Rosie’s heavier boobs. She’s bursting too big a bubble of gum, and now there’s a skin of it on her lips. They passed around a hash-oil spliff and Rosie murmured how womblike water feels when you’re stoned.

Then Dolores farted. Rosie shrieked and, for the first time, Dolores smiled, too; her laughs came out, reluctantly, in a series of little short explosions. Those muscular lips of hers made an upside-down smile, and laughter spurted out. Robbie made a skeletal roof with his fingers and, resting his chin there, sat in stern judgement on his flush-handled throne.

“Hey!” Rosie said. “Don’t you here’s the church and here’s the steeple at
me.”
She howled again and Dolores sputtered, the two of them thrashed about like stupid smiley dolphins and banged their heads on the bathtub rim. Rosie choked on her gum and swallowed it, and that made them laugh some more. “Oh what, do you think Marilyn Monroe shitted
ice cream?
Girls are only human, Robbie, get a grip.”

Rosie and Dolores weren’t exactly moving in, Rosie promised him. They were still officially shacking up at her apartment in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, with Dolores’ old man, Bill the Beast, but since the Dead Man’s Hands had started running their own highly profitable methamphetamine-still, up in Nitro, Bill and his friends had taken to mixing the stuff in its liquid form with
their beer, and, smoking killerweed – parsley sprinkled with
PCP
– and they were getting rabid and unpredictable. They were partying hard and, Rosie said, starting to show up at L’Enfer Strip a lot more than usual. Rosie had convinced her to hide out at Robbie’s until the guy burned himself out, or got killed playing chicken on his bike, or something pleasant like that. Robbie wasn’t so sure what he felt about harbouring a biker’s runaway mama, but so it goes, that’s what friends are for. The only bad thing about having girls around is you have to remember to lower the toilet seat after you’re done – the first night he forgot and at four in the morning, short-sighted Rosie fell in.

The next night, or the night after, in spite of Robbie’s spray-painted memo re:
NO IDOLS!
, a Hell’s Yells fan surprised him with a blowjob behind the cinema screen. In his electrostatic haze of speed and booze he wasn’t ever quite sure how it started, but suddenly, during a break in the sonic onslaught, he was up against an old Egyptian god and she was on her knees looking at him as if to ask permission. All he could manage was eyes as round as buttons, a smile with teeth as tight as a zipper. Problem with this particular
BJ
was, it wasn’t enough like those letters in
Bosom Buddies
, for she never said anything really filthy to him. She didn’t murmur or moan, or sit back from time to time to admire his joystick. His mighty schlong. If anything, it hurt. Then he sort of guided her head to help her. He looked up at the screen, and thought of that movie Ivy once brought him to,
She Stoops to Conquer
. The pictures came to him, like a film projector was between his ears shining images on his eyeballs; the celluloid strip snaked through his head, twenty-six frames a second. He thrust a little more eagerly, and he was welling up, and she looked up at him with her long face to see if he was close, and he was, and then a shocking thing happened: his semen came spurting out through her nostrils. Chrissake. He had only ever seen that
in a
Fritz the Cat
comic, and assumed it was something that could only happen in a comic. She stumbled off to blow her nose. And after he’d pulled himself together, he walked out onto the stage to accept the crowd’s applause with open arms.

If there was one thing he hated more than raking leaves, it was shovelling snow. Out in front of the apartment building, perched up on a ridge of ice, he raised the shovel above his shoulders and brought it down with a clang. The corners of the blade curled up like paper. His hands stung with the impact. He thought of the first pioneers, bravely battling off Indians and the flu and building log cabins with their bare hands, and how they must have got one fuck of shock the winter of fourteen hundred whatever. To find it lasted five months of the year. They must have lain in their beds through the dark mornings, under heaps of beaver pelts, watching their breath condense in columns above them, and had some serious second thoughts about the whole enterprise. Why didn’t they listen to their better instincts and take off home? If they endured it for the sake of future generations, well, they ain’t getting a monument from Robbie, he’ll tell you that much for free.