Kicking Tomorrow (22 page)

So anyhow: Hell’s Yells’ stage set.

Yes, a stage set…

… he’s been picking his nose for a while now, rooting around in there like a robbing hobbit, and he wonders what to do with the mucilagenous specimens – the dragon Snot’s treasure – which he’s collected on the tips of both index fingers. He has his hands poised like a doctor awaiting rubber gloves. He wonders how long has he been up there, deep in the nose…

Gets up and goes to the bathroom for more toilet paper. Pulls at the roll a little harder than he intended (he’s pretty woozy now, he admits) and yards of the stuff, the cheap kind that sheds white fibres, unfurl onto the floor.
Chrissake
, what does it take? If your ambition in life is to be a bum-wad manufacturer, how much work does it take to get it right? You make the stuff
soft
,
K
, you make it
strong
so it doesn’t shed, and you perforate it
properly
so the pieces come off without tearing down the middle and dragging the rest of the roll onto the floor.
K?
What in hell else have
you got to occupy your day? Can you really say you’re proud of your life? He catches his reflection in the mirror and glares at himself.

“Dopey,” he says, aloud. “Numbskull.”

And slaps his forehead. A wave of anxiety like a hot mist sweeps through his mind, condensing on the surface of his skin. He knows it. Almost three and he hasn’t drawn a thing all day. His palms are damp. He’s frightened and dizzy. And he’s broke. The apartment is quiet. Except for the
tanking
of the radiator. And the gas leaking from the stove smells like sweet burning vinyl. He gets a fresh beer, puts on a record and sits down again to really apply himself. Holds a
Bosom Buddies
magazine on his lap. He’s going to draw a vicious caricature of Keef Richards. He’ll illustrate the emptiness of the guy’s life by piecing his face together in a
trompe l’oeil
of naked women. This will be Hell’s Yells’ first album cover.

Casually leafing. Hello, here’s one of Robbie’s favourite actresses, Kiki Van Garterbelt, having a nude pillow fight with some co-eds in the dorm of a Canadian university. She might serve
OK
as a model for his cartoon. Though he’d prefer something less lewd – here her knees are off opposite edges of the page…

There aren’t any less lewd. That’s what he concludes after fifteen minutes, or maybe more. Of stroking the bishop.
De bishop
, as Louie Louie would call it. The gronker’s voice comes to him like that.
Shaking ands wit your wife’s best friend. Aving a talk wit Mudder Fist and er five children, uff uff
.

Masturbate. The real word feels unclean: the long word, the long wrinkled word, with a personal odour to it. That you rub up and down. He stops, looks around, ashamed. He should be working. At Collège Blanchemains, M. Nul. once told the class that some ancient Egyptian cults believed the moment of Creation
was experienced in the ecstacy of divine masturbation. Robbie pictured the stars in the night sky then, and particularly the Milky Way, as this spray of sacred sperm. Then he caught Gaston Goupil’s grin and one-fisted gesture, and grinned despite himself. And they had both got detentions.

These magazines creep up on him, infect him, cause him to stew in his own juices. The afternoon light has faded, the streetlamps are already switching on in chains, and from the electric billboard on Park Avenue, the crackling neon colours of Eccelucci’s latest line of lingerie casts pastel shadows through the windows of the apartment. Brat, by the way, boasts that he never humps his fist,
’cause he can’t reach
, but that if he could, he wouldn’t feel guilty because he’s Jewish and proud of it.
Jews are cool
, Robbie hears him hold forth belligerently at the Toe Blake Tavern, I
read the holy books. I been to shul. The rabbis of old said it was
OK
, as far as onanism, eh – they recommended that a man of whom his wife has a bun in the oven – and I quote, I believe, Eliezer – ‘thresh inside and winnow outside.’
Louie Louie goes,
Et ça veut dire quoi, hostie?
Brat replies,
It means that the man may beat his meat, even in the presence of the baby
.

Switching on the light to pull himself together. These quicksand pictures. And the next thing Robbie knows, he’s reading the letters. Though he’s wise to them. He knows they’re not real. You can tell because certain coincidences in the language always crop up, if you read closely. For instance, here are three supposedly different guys, all proud possessors of eleven-inch so-called joysticks, who each describe the object of their lust as a dripping honeypot. Now do you know one single person in real life who calls a vagina a honeypot, or a penis a joystick? So three in one magazine is just too much.

Another beer and he turns to a page of ads with men sporting elephantine joysticks and endorsing Special Spurious Sex
Pills. He’s not taken in by these, either – he knows spurious means not genuine, because Brat once told him that when a mailorder customer tried to sue Lovely Things Inc. over the failure of their Spectacular Spurious IQ Increasers, the company’s attorney successfully argued that the customer ought to have used a dictionary before ordering them – and Robbie feels sorry for all the ignorant men in North America who will be similarly disappointed after they receive the Special Spurious Sex Pills in an unmarked brown paper package, thinking that spurious means something between spurt and furious, and expecting to suddenly possess copious ejaculatory powers.

He turns a heavy glossy page.
EASY LAYS
, he reads,
HOW TO SPOT THEM
: Some are shy, some need a little warming up, others simply require cab fare. Interesting. And Robbie wonders, is there really such a thing as nympho housewives? And monopede mania – do some men really have a fetish for women’s leg-stumps? More ads now, promising books and films available only in the U.S. The plot summaries revolve around partners with mammoth members and esurient appetites for swallowing, it seems, just about anything. Photos too: sex zombies, contortionists – Kiki Van in a special appearance! – with ink screens printed over their genitals. Robbie supposes this is to protect the reader from a sight he may not relish, and understandably so. Black bars conceal the men’s joysticks; black dots disguise the women’s honeypots. Problem is, the obfuscations have incited his imagination all the more, and now he’s seized with a desire to own these books or films. Immediately. But there’s nothing quite so explicit available anywhere in Montreal, so far as he knows, and it will take three weeks if he sends off in the mail for one. He’ll have to draw something explicit for himself.…

Sitting with his pencil hovering above the fresh white paper. His groin hot and tumid. And the phone rings again.

It’s Barnabus on the line, sounding worried.

“Rob?”

“Yes. Hi, Barnabus. Bad timing.”

“But I’ve got a stomach ache. I got sent home from school. ’Cause I can’t go to the toilet.”

“That’s just constipation, Barn. Eat a banana.”

“It’s not that. I don’t want to. It’s… I saw something bad on
TV
. On Mom’s show.”

“What did you see?”

“About all the poolution in the world.”

“
Poll
ution, you nit.”

“No, it’s
poo
lution, I know. I’m afraid to poolute the planet Earth.”

“Oh boy, Barn, is
no
one taking care of you there?”

“Mom’s away. Dad’s asleep. And Miriam hates me. Will you come over and play?”

“Sorry, Barn. I’m way too busy. Go watch
TV
.”

“But that’s what everyone says,” Barnabus whines in his ear. “Please?”

“Look, I really gotta go. Sorry.
K
?”

“
K
… Bye.”

So, anyway: the trick here is to infuse each stroke of the pencil with a special sexy feeling. The fusing of his artistic skill with his figgy lust will produce something new: an image to make you go sticky, no matter what your sexual inclination. Just as Robbie feels it as he draws it, so’ll you feel it as you follow the lines with your eyes. He plans a wild priapic scene, a hot fantasia with horny lickerish satyrs and fleshy nymphs bound with garlands of flowers. The satyrs will dance around, wielding their organs like giant soft cabers, great huggable totem poles with heaps of pubic hair as thick as dewy moss. With a flick of watery gouache here, and a dollop of creamy impasto there, he’ll make
the very paper writhe in pleasure. He’ll swish and dribble the paint so that even on an abstract level, or upside-down maybe, the picture will reveal itself to be one great climax, all marigold sperm and carnelian bollocks and wet wet carnation cunts. An arousing inflorescence. An aphrodisiac painting.

But when he finally puts his pencil to the paper he’s too impatient to render the nymphs’ feet. He’s never ever been able to draw feet and fit all the toes in, fuck. Feet are tough for anyone to draw – look at a Picasso, even. Robbie should have got Rosie to pose for him after all. And now he hears her voice, close in his ear:
You think I’m ugly
.

K
, so feet aren’t the most important part of the picture. He’ll go back to them later. But the hands are harder. He keeps erasing them, and he’s wearing the surface of the paper away. Fuckshit, he’s truly bummed out now. The knees of the satyrs look knobbly. The nymphs look lumpen and awkward. Plus, it’s impossible to come up with twelve different expressions of lust-fulness.
You
try three, even. His fingers are numb and damp, and the pencil squirms between them. He can concentrate only on their honeypots.

He makes a concerted effort to grasp onto his inspiration by detailing some roly-poly labia. Afterwards he’ll fill out the bodies. He thinks of those Rubens he likes – how beautifully unashamed they are! And there’s a Matisse he knows, nudes dancing in a circle – they’re so simple! Why can’t he do something lovely like that?

But what he ends up with is a quick, scurrilous sketch of disembodied sexual organs copulating, scratchy and smudged, lousy as toilet graffiti, the full coarseness of which he appreciates clearly only after he’s ejaculated an albescent fountain onto the paper, like oyster-white oil paint squeezed from the tube.

A week or so later, several false starts later, Robbie decided that if he threw out his collection of
Bosom Buddies
magazines, he’d stand a better chance of concentrating. He’d clean up the place, too, get his mind together, do some exercises maybe, even limber up his voice. In the shower he was capable of howling his way, totally from memory, through all four sides of
Jesus Christ Superstar
, and that’s what he did beneath the rusting faucet. He was a soap-spitting prune-toed one-man-band as he did the twelve-part harmonies of the Disciples, the thirty-nine lashes, the angels’ lament for the dead Judas, the lot. And really
relating
. He stretched his arms out to see his ribs protrude. In the movie version, by the way, you could actually see JC’s underwear through his loincloth during the crucifixion. Which was unrealistic. He thought about this. Fruit of the Loom, looked like. Ruined the illusion of those heavy Biblical times, which was typical since the director of the movie was
Canadian
, fuck.

Then the water turned freezing cold. Just like that. At first he figured there was insufficient pressure in the old building for hot water to reach the second floor, but, when he turned the tap just half a revolution further, it went scalding. Then, before he could twist it back, the water went freezing again. Call him paranoid, but that’s when he knew for a fact that mad Mrs. Grissom was manipulating the taps of her bathtub downstairs just to get a rise out of him.

Turning the water off, he realized the phone was ringing. He ran to the bedroom, kneeled dripping on his mattress, and picked up the receiver, his tongue cocked to deliver abuse.

It was Officer Gaunt. The pig’s voice was so pleasant that at first Robbie figured he must be satisfied with the investigations, and was calling to say thanks very much for everything. But then Gaunt barked at him to get his Royal Canadian rump in gear and present himself at Station 10 by nine-thirty a.m., sharp. Robbie protested that he had some serious work to do, but the line had
already gone dead. He slammed the receiver down, put his face in the pillow, and yelled with all his might.

Sitting in the interrogation room on an empty stomach and only eight hours’ sleep wasn’t Robbie’s idea of a good time. The bare white room buzzed in the light of a neon strip, and smelled like one enormous ashtray; in his ripped and safety-pinned
KEEF SUCKS
T-shirt he felt small as a crushed butt. Goose pimples came up on his arms – the temperature of the room had been set a few degrees below the threshold of comfort. He drummed on the table, buh-dumming a tune under his breath, picking lint from his belly button. Tried not to think about what was happening to him. Save it all and make a new T-shirt. But every thirty seconds, fear kicked his chest like a lizard in an eggshell.