Kicking Tomorrow (44 page)

“Moof, moof,” Joe told Robbie. “Time is money. Money is freedom. Freedom’s for the birds. This I tell Spassky when I beat him.” He offered him some Canadian sherry. Robbie accepted.

“You beat Spassky? So how come you’re here, Joe? You could be rich.”

Joe looked at him. Such crazy people downtown. “I got
health plan
in Quebec, boy without a brain. Boy without money. You want to talk or moof?”

Robbie found some money, later that afternoon, in a wallet on the sidewalk. He splurged on a
BIG BIG HAPPY PIZZA
, wolfed it down and got a wicked case of indigestion. Then he visited Classics, thinking of buying an art book. He bent over the heavy
volumes, melted snow dripping off his head, and felt his toes thaw, as his imagination bloomed. New names, new pictures, new ideas for him here – De Chirico, Ernst, Miró – which he was committing to memory, to tell Rosie all about, to help redesign their future, as in-store security once more ushered him out.

He would have bought something decent if he’d been given the chance. Passing by a newsstand now, his attention was drawn by Andy Warhol’s
Interview
, the Xmas issue, with Keef Richards on the cover. He went to Gino’s Paradise and read it ostentatiously there. As he drank bourbon and beer, he read about the beautiful people and imagined that he could be one of them, only even more beautiful, and in his own fashion. These vain, conceited people with their gossipy lunches and mindless hedonistic pursuits; Robbie’s interview would be more interesting by a mile, his reputation for fun and smarts unmatched, his Avedon portrait truly a register of style and the enviable life.

Moving on for cheaper booze when almost all his money was spent, he discovered that Judy’s Bar, where Ivy and he once drank and rolled cigarettes, was burnt to a crisp. He sat in the charred doorway, like the entry to an abandoned coal mine, the dancing miners all gone up in smoke. He bunched newspapers about him the way he had seen the rummies do. He had no intention of actually reading them, but boredom got the better of him in time, and he foraged for the latest on Mr. Mills’ barbershop, perhaps, or the Dead Man’s Hands, anything.

Chrissake! Here was someone he knew, in
Allô Police:
Louie Louie,
the
Louis Beaulieu. Who’d been busted.

On Brat’s advice, Robbie knew, Louie Louie had begun to import reggae records from Jamaica for his new store, only some of them weren’t exactly reggae records; they were ganja, pressed in the shape of reggae records. According to
Allô Police
, the hapless pepsi had not bargained for the fact that Jamaican records
aren’t shrink-wrapped, and so a dog in customs had smelled out the very first shipment.
The
Louis Beaulieu was now doing five years in St-Vincent-de-Paul.

Rolling his eyes, Robbie saw a jet leave a short slice in the sky, a luminous paper-cut in the pale flesh of the heavens, and he wished he could be on that jet. When he looked down again he was surprised to see an old woman coming fast at him, all in black with a shawl and a cane. They almost bumped: Grandma Bethel! He hadn’t seen her since that fiasco of a Seder; she looked so small and hunched now, like a beetle, picking her way across the ice. The city is no place for old people, he thought. He stopped, waited for her to recognize him. He found himself smiling. Hey, maybe they’d have some tea and cookies at her house – he could tell her all about himself. She did look up, finally, but the gaze she gave him was uncertain. Her eyes looked huge through her glasses, darting like startled fish in a bowl, and she hurried right past him, leaving him to wonder if she had deliberately shunned him, or if his appearance was so spectral, his smell so alcoholic, that
anyone
would be scared, and shy away.

Back in the Roxy, he tried to sleep off his hunger, folded up like a skull and crossbones. In his dream, he walks the streets alone. For this crisp day he’s surprised to find people have made a decision: they’ve had it with city life. Ice-blue sky above the silent skycrappers and there’s no traffic down here at all. He can breathe the air, it almost smells of the sea. A cool breeze, and a chip bag blows by like a laughing silver kite. It lands on a rich, green verge where the snow has melted away. He bends down to pick it up: the last one on earth, the final piece of rubbish, and what a sense of satisfaction to have finished the job… then when he was awakened by a heavy-duty jet roaring overhead, he had a ridiculous reaction: he whimpered for them not to drop the Bomb, to let this not be the end. He had so much left to do with his life.

He tried to sleep, but hunger followed him under the blanket and kicked him in the stomach. He sat at the window, listening to the bleat and gurgle of the skyrats, his forehead slick with perspiration, his eyes closed, absorbing heat from the winter sun, the blood volcanoes erupting. He watched the specula slide over the jellied surface beneath his eyelids, jumping like zoo-plankton, like a cartoon cash register, like one of those Mirós he saw in Classics, whenever he moved his eyeballs.

How long was it since he had eaten properly? In the Roxy can there was always the row of toilet bowls, unoccupied, their open mouths howling for more than he could give. He felt like a character in a high seas drama, cut adrift by mutineers, and becoming as preoccupied as children with their own stool; marking detailed updates on the size and state of it in the ship’s log.
Woe. Six mere pebbles today, akin to gull droppings. No sign of land. Now will someone please wipe my bummy?
The fever clung to him, sending shivers all over his skin, pulling the muscles over his rack of bones, and frequently sending him back again in a dash, only to make a paltry offering. Sitting on the freezing seat, he realized that what little he had dislodged was at least sending up warmth. So he sat a while longer. Sitting in the pitch-black toilet, trying to evacuate some spicy tacos. Delirious, perching up one half of his pelvis to give the muscles of his miserable ilium a better grip, he found himself thinking, Maybe this is what it’s like to have it up the ass. Kind of ecstatic. Painful euphoria. The walls of the rectum alive and hot. The outer body blooming with goose-pimples. His nose running. Other concerns just fall away; all the world is well during this little struggle, all the world is well. His life will change soon. Concentrating like this, he can make a change.

Hunger makes you tired, he found, if only because you exhaust yourself thinking about it all the time. He wearied himself thinking about his body, worrying about his deadened senses, his dribbling sinuses, the lining of his bleeding stomach – ulcers
planted there by cheap, spicy junk food and liquor breakfasts – and the cramps and hemorrhoids and the wasted nerves and loosened teeth he’d developed from all that bad speed. Go ahead, try it sometime. What he didn’t know, but could feel, was a duodenal ulcer that had inflamed his lower stomach, in particular his pancreas, giving him pancreatitis, and his liver, giving him hepatitis; the increased bile pigments in his blood had given him jaundice, which explained his yellow eyes, and the internal bleeding led to a case of pernicious anaemia, and frightening bouts of bloody vomiting and excretion. He didn’t just have
heartburn
, as he thought; it was his whole bloody gut.

He watched a fly struggle to defeat the invisible wall of the windowpane. It had begun to bang and baffle itself the day before, and this morning it was still there, slower, bruised, still crawling stupidly across the glass. Robbie went out to get a job.

He will change, and here’s his plan: to offer his creative services to the new management at L’Enfer Strip; he had all sorts of ideas for renovating it, and for a reasonable price, too. He heard Rosie’s delighted voice in his ears:
it sounds like you care. No one ever gives a shit about us. I like you
. Even if she wasn’t working there any more, he might do something, at least to give Dolores’ life a lift.

He presented himself to the doorman, some new guy with a wide kipper tie, and eyes as grey as shark’s gills, and asked to speak to the manager about work. The doorman made a face as dull and heavy as lead in a sock, and told him to wait. Robbie paced the lobby, taking in the nude posters, not for the tits and ass, but considering ways to lend the joint some class. The doorman returned with an application form. Robbie was disappointed. He said he wanted to speak to the manager personally, but the doorman held out a pen.

“Hey, guy, look,” he said. “I’m a friend of Rosie’s – I’m Robbie Bookbinder. Also I know Olly. You know, this was his joint once.”

“Is that the fucken say so. You know Olly?”

“Yeah, sure,” Robbie said, encouraged. “We go way back, fuck.”

“Olly’s fucken history, buddy,” the doorman said, shunting a toothpick around his mouth.

“Fuck. Yeah?” Robbie said.

“Fucken A.”

“Fuck. Where’d he go? I haven’t seen him in a fucken dog’s age.”

“He’s
dead
, fuck.”

Robbie quickly took the pen and the form. He read –

– and carefully folded it down to a tiny square. Then slunk outdoors again with burning ears.

He went into a department store to scrounge free samples, but was given the bum’s rush by the in-store security. He shuffled on along the sidewalk, thinking black and tangled thoughts, ruminations on how to destroy the world, enraged by the noise
of the city now that he wasn’t making it himself, and ended up accepting a coffee at the Christian Mission Drop-In Centre, after an eager young fellow with a brush-cut and polyester slacks called out to him,

“Hey! Yes you! You look in need of some
SALVATION!
”

No one knew Robbie lived at the Roxy, but Scurvy knew that’s where he’d been storing the equipment, and now it was the end of March and the six-month term was up. Bummer, because Robbie’d been hatching a plot to take the world by storm with a solo show, one in which he’d plug in a cacophonous kitchenful of appliances,
TV
sets, hairdryers, and other symbols of terminal consumerism and middle-classness, over-amplify it all mightily, kick it around, and let the feedback roar as he sang. If you could call it
singing
. It would be a stunning performance, the wild amplification of all his desires and frustrations. This was his new thing. Art on paper and canvas was dead; it had all been done, it affected no one any more. To be noticed today you had to perform your art noisily, force it on people, be a sharp stick in society’s eye. Like Mom; she’d made anger an art and performed it on
TV
. He’d howl in his own angry style; he’d wiggle his prick through his fly and grimace from ear to ear, splitting his face open to show how much he cared, too. That was the problem with the deadhead seventies – people didn’t care enough about anything, they’d stopped demonstrating anger.…

So it was a
major
bummer to wake up one morning to clattering sounds, peek down from his gallery, and see men lifting the equipment away from its storage space behind the cinema screen. He crouched on the scaffolding stairs and watched in agony as they carted his last hope away.

He still had Ivy’s boxes, and now in the Roxy he guarded them the way a dragon will jealously sit on its treasure; fearful of its theft, with no use for it at all. He sat on it, jumping at every creak the building made, sleeping with a steak knife at his chest. Out on the street he was watchful of slow cars, and he made paranoid detours whenever he returned to the Roxy, sneaking up the fire escape only after dark.

Breakfast of eggs, with the white all runny, at the Mission, and Robbie found that he was the most despised of men, because even the rummies here looked down on him; they, at least, were on welfare, while he had never worked and did not qualify. He was a scummy punk with dirty fingernails and a mod parka scrawled with incomprehensible slogans, scrounging a free meal and smelling fiendish, when he should be out somewhere contributing to society – that’s what was written on their hoary faces. But Robbie knew he was better than them; he had been brought up in a lovely family, he had been to the theatre, his favourite artist was Rubens, he was blessed with possibility. There they all were: Joe and his chessboard, the bus-worshipper, the lunatic with the mat of hair, and all the other grubby bums, murmuring together and nodding smugly in his direction. He glared back and fired a finger pistol at his head, opening his mouth to let his eggs drool out like pus.

Bingo! All it cost was a couple of bucks, and then you took your chances. He had earned six bucks giving blood at the Red Cross, and bought an evening’s supply of cards. Looking around him now in the church basement: ladies mainly, scrawny old ones with plastic net shopping bags, obese ones in cotton dresses, toothless ones masticating their gums; couch potatoes, welfare abusers, hunchbacks, alcoholics, the disappointed of the earth, the abused and the neglected, the halitosis-stricken, the slimy piss-poor, all those fallen through the nets of government statistics.

“Under the G, forty-three… B eight… N thirty-one…”

He found it hard to keep up. He was scanning his cards like a madman, six of them taped to the table the way he had observed the ladies doing it, placing his plastic tokens down as fast as possible, asking
what
number?
what
number? and getting shushed.

“I twenty… B two… B thirt-teen…”

The Knights of Columbus officer read the numbers from the stage in a monotone that Robbie found unendurable after a couple of hours. He was stunned by the listlessness of the game. He remembered how once on a childhood cruise to Europe with the family, in the brass-railed lounge of the
Empress of Canada
, he had giggled at the caller’s delivery: Under the B – men from the ministry – number 11… under the N – pregnant ladies – number 33… under the B – the day of God’s rest – number 7…. The Knights of Columbus version was as bland as corn chips and an afternoon soap. In fact, watching
TV
was a lively exercise compared to this; there was a surge of electricity in the air as boards filled up, but when someone won, no applause – just the collective sigh of envy, and the massive swish of tokens being swept up. The woman across from him had her own deluxe wire-meshed tokens, which she swept up by means of a magnetic plastic wand, and tapped into her own personal plastic pouch.