Kicking Tomorrow (34 page)

A brisk December afternoon and,
Happy Chanukah!
, Brat was on another generosity trip. He picked Robbie up in a cab, and
they headed for L’Enfer Strip. Brat was nervous as a buzzsaw. Angel dust’ll do that to you, Robbie the discriminating substance-abuser observed warily. Wag your fingers in front of a neon strip and that’s the way the world must look from Brat’s perspective now.

“Hey, Rob, now that the pepsis rule Quebec, right, there’s language laws that says the Lovely Fruit Company’s gotta remove all the stickers that read
banana
on their bananas. My Dad protests that that’ll make it too expensive to import them, so the fucken
PQ
goes, Eh bien, de Québécois will do witout
bananes
. Is that like,
WHOA
, or what?”

The cab was still a block away, gridlocked at the lights, but the driver switched off his meter and said pleasantly, “Bon, les gars, trois piasses – ça va.”

“Nice!” Robbie said.

But Brat spat, “Wassat? Speak to me in
Hinglish
, man.”

“Hey, hey,” Robbie said. “Read. Says three dollars.”

“Yeah, well, I’m
SICK
of this. I’m gonna punch him out! Either he tells me in English, or I ain’t forking over a fucken nickel.” Brat opened the cab door, stepped into the street without closing it again. Traffic swerved around, honking.

“Hey, buddy,” he shouted through the driver’s window and kicking the door. “Come again. Tell me how
MUCH
?”

The cabbie signalled with his fingers,
trois piasses
, not at all nicely now. He opened his door. Brat wasted no time. He headbutted the driver. The driver held his nose, plopping out heavily onto the street, one foot jammed under his seat. Brat kneeled on his chest.

“ENGLISH ENGLISH
, you pepsi
FUCKER
,” he shouted. “Tell me how much I
OWE
!”

A knot of pedestrians had gathered to watch. One couple cheered.

“Hey, cool out, man,” Robbie said, dragging him back by his neck. Now there was the old familiar siren screaming. They took off, cackling like bats out of hell.

When they got to L’Enfer Strip, Rosie gave them a look that would sour milk. No free beers were forthcoming, no hot dogs, nothing. Brat was still acting like a dickhead. He even looked like an erect penis, sitting three-quarters in his chair to ogle girls dancing at other people’s tables, his neck thrust as far as it would go. “Ever thought what a vagina is, Robbie?” he said. “A wet, smelly, sucking hole with flaps. And that’s what makes men crazy with love. Weird, eh? All it is is we all wanna marry our mothers. I know cause I read Freud, eh.”

Robbie watched as Brat talked to everyone, calling strangers
buddy
, addressing the strippers by the names pinned to their brassieres; he was still on his generosity trip, buying beers all around and grinning, thumb-things up, as they stripped.

“The ugly ones appreciate it when you’re nice,” he confided. “Whoa! When a broad has great jugs and she can dance, know-addimean, Rob, you arsewipe? I really
know
dancing when I see it.”

Robbie found himself feeling suddenly prudish and censorious. He could just picture Brat at the ballet, knowing dance when he saw it.

“Hey, guy,” Brat said. “You’re weirded out these days. Still hung up on that chick Ivy, I guess. Fuck me, you’ve got lousy taste in women. This Rosie chick, like
whoa
, toys in the attic, or what? You hear her on the radio the other day?”

“No, what?”

“Phone-in show about divorce, right, and she comes on, says her real name and everything.” Brat leaning over, confidential now. “She goes, ‘My Daddy’s got a new girlfriend, and I’m worried now he won’t want me any more.’ Can you
believe
it?
What is she, twenty-three, right, she hangs round with dorks like you half her age, and she wants to marry her father, fuck. I’d steer clear if I was you, dude. Slap the salami instead, pull the pud, it’s disease-free. I took French Lit, it’s like Sartre said, eh, ‘the pleasure given coincides with the enjoyment received.’”

Brat turned to the next table and picked up a conversation with a man in a polyester jacket with extra-wide lapels and a kipper tie. A stripper was engaged in contortions on the top of his table: she had propped her heels on the back of his chair with her legs suspended over his shoulders, and gripped the edges of the table behind her to hold herself up, spreading her thighs in front of his face while he ate his lunch.

“Hey, buddy,” Brat said, “is this seat taken?” The man gave him the look of someone interrupted at his reading for the fourteenth time. “Hey,” Brat said. “I
know
you from somewhere, don’t I?”

“That right?” the man replied. He pushed his greasy plate under the stripper’s suspension-bridged body – and nibbled a toothpick. He fixed Brat with eyes as slitted and grey as sharks’ gills. “Where from?”

“Jeez, lemme see, now,” Brat said.

“You know Olly?”

“Olly, lemme see. Yeah. Course, we go way back.”

“Yeah?” the guy said. “I ain’t seen him in a dog’s age. I hear he’s out. How’s he doen?”

“Well y’know…” Brat said. “I don’t know him that good really.”

The man stared at him, shunting his toothpick around. He stood up and walked away, leaving the stripper to clear away the plate and cutlery.

“Et maintenant,
MES
dames et
MES
sieurs, veuillez réclamer la charrrrmante
CHAS
tity!”

Rosie climbed the stage and pointedly ignored the boys as she started up her bump and grind. Robbie wasn’t sure if he should watch or not. By way of compromise, he stuck his nose in his beer and snuck glances. She was dancing without much conviction, cautiously back from the lip of the stage. She hadn’t even troubled to wear an outfit, and chewed her gum like a cow at her cud. Robbie followed her childish, myopic face and thought meanly, She barely knows she’s alive. It was the most obscene thing he could think of, but he thought it, anyway, and added, What is she doing with her life?

Leaving the club an hour later, they shielded their eyes from the afternoon sun, and Brat told Robbie he was quitting Hell’s Yells. To be a male model, he said. He showed him the set of photographs he’d had done at an agency: Brat sporting a foulard and looking like his horse is coming in; Brat in a hound’s-tooth jacket gazing earnestly at a distant horizon; Brat in spiffy tennis shorts squinting into the sun and looking determined.

Robbie, who had now glued and knotted actual nails in his hair and put a zircon stud in his nose, said, “Don’t you think they’re gonna need other poses? Like, with arms?”

“Equal opportunity, man. I plan to sue the first bastard who rejects me.”

“But I thought you’re gonna work for your dad?”

“I want it all, man! I get featured in the national talent catalogue. The head office is in Toronto, which is where I’m bound, anyhow – ’cause of all this
PQ
shit coming down, my old man’s moving Lovely Things to where money counts, in the language that counts. First of the new year.”

“I don’t get. I was meaning to ask.
What
PQ
shit, exactly?”

“The election, numbnuts. Montreal’s the pits now. It’s going to the dogs as far as foreign investment, eh – the Yanks are backing off like we’ve switched to Communism. Maybe
there’s gonna be a revolution, like
hup against de wall, Hinglish.”

“Oh, right, right. The election. But what about Hell’s Yells, guy?”

“Well, I could of went the other way like you, but I’m opting for success. I want my bananas.”

That evening, Rosie was in a rage because, after Robbie and Brat had left, the weirdo in the raincoat had come around again and called her a fornicator. Plus, the editor of the
Montreal Star’s
Lifestyle section turned down her idea for a photo-story on the Second Annual Tits For Tots Yuletide Stripperama.

“Inappropriate subject for the Christmas season
. Tell that to those poor little
kids,”
she said.
“Shit
. Maybe I’ll set up a home for battered women, I don’t know, a
REFUGE
from the
Church.”

They were elbowing through the last-minute shopping rush, Rosie homing in on every free sample, every demonstration, every give-away item the department store had to offer. She squirted
eau de toilette
on her wrist, answered a questionnaire and received an indestructible pen that was guaranteed to write underwater and in outer space, and scored a microwaved meat pie for Robbie. He chomped at it greedily. People stared.

“Hi! I’m Robbie Bookbinder,” he said, “and that’s my Mom.” For there she was, on forty-five
TV
sets at once: a Holiday Season Special! presented from resorts around the world with a complete guide to sunscreens, six ways to recognize mercury poisoning when you catch fish, and how to tell if battery acid’s been dumped in a stream –
before
your children swim in it!

What a dinful season – piped-in music, Salvation Army bells, Ogilvy’s in-store bagpiper blaring away. And now, with these commercials, they’re arranging carols like rock songs. The soundtrack to his youth, quit fucking with them. Who are the cynical old scumbags responsible for this? Own up. A security guard asked him to leave or stop yelling.

“Bug
OFF
!” he shouted. He was ejected by two security guards.

Rosie clung to him as they vaulted over a lake of curbside slush. “Blows me away how
heavy
life’s getting,” she said, and she was talking a mile a minute. “Like, I don’t think you should even come to the club any more. Did you notice in the club how all the announcements are French
ONLY?
I thought it was all that
PQ
jazz, and it
is
, but in a
twisted
sort of way – there’s been a buyout or a gang war more probably, cos the Jean-Guys from the Châteauguay chapter are all over the place, and they’re like
RABID
separatists. Dolores tells me things are heating up real bad on the biker scene generally in Quebec, eh – they say the Satan’s Choice have been absorbed by the
Outlaws
, and the
Popeyes
are facing off against the
Angels
, ’n they’re like animals salivating
BLOOD
from their
glands!
Even smaller gangs like the Dead Man’s Hands used to have a strip of the road, right, but these days everyone’s being dragged into the fight. Guys like Bill the Beast are just itching to
DESTROY
. I’m real scared for Dolores, I do hope you don’t mind us shacking up with you for good now, I mean that boiling water incident was one thing – she
ASKED
for it, sort of – but yesterday Bill tried to pin her hand to the
BED
with a
KNIFE
! For no good
reason!”

A second care package, which Robbie opened guiltily. He knew Mom’s birthday was shortly before Xmas, but for some reason this year he couldn’t remember the date exactly. She wasn’t the type of mother to remind anybody how many shopping days remained before her birthday, and he hadn’t had a chance to ask. He intended to call Miriam and check with her, but since he didn’t have a phone, he kept forgetting. He knew all Mom wanted was flowers. That’s all she ever wanted in wintertime. He could have
simply stolen some and sent them any old day, she wasn’t a stickler for dates. But he couldn’t seem to get around to it.

He delved in. Bag of wheat germ, seaweed strips, box of liqueur-filled chocolates. He ate the chocolates while he read the note: