Kicking Tomorrow (24 page)

“Câline de bines,”
Louie Louie whistled when Robbie returned. “Dat fox in de Datsun commercial, she could suck de chrome off a trailer itch.” And now they’re onto the litany of Louie Louie’s regrets. “You know, guys, I’m almos tirty and I tell you dis so you don make de same misstake has me. I fart aroun for ten year wit my ’arley, living off classy girls – like Suzette, who run dat manicure salon, eh – and giving dem great doggies and getting waste. But now wit you I tink tings is appen real soon. I pay my debt and
make my vieux père appy. E’s get old and I wanna be someone before e die. I’ll put is name on de halbum cover too, Beaulieu, in is honour. Make im proud, hostie.”
The
Louis Beaulieu stopping now to close his buckshot eyes, and slug back a full glass of piss-thin draught.

Robbie swayed at a thirty-degree angle off his chair and made a face of slack-jawed, loose-lidded superciliousness,
hyulk hyulk
. He’s not feeling a fucking thing, never will again. What’s the point, the world’s already gone to the dogs as it is, what does it need one more fucked-up perspective anyway?

Many more beers, and several bourbons later, off they went at last to become the world famous Hell’s Yells. When the Roxy emptied out, the boys hauled their mountain of amps onto the stage in front of the screen, and the projectionist projected movies all over them without the sound. It was the best light show you could imagine –
2001: A Space Odyssey; Night of the Living Dead; The Rocky Horror Picture Show;
Robbie drunk as a skunk, staggering around, while Brat kicked his guitar screaming across the empty auditorium, and Louie Louie hammered his head with a mike. Robbie feels nothing but his stomach reaching hungrily up his raw bourbon-marinated throat. He’s stripped off his shirt to become a fleshpad of moving tattoos. He expands his rib cage and stretches his arms out and opens his ears as big as ravenous mouths to guzzle this amazing noise down, till he’s full to the brim. In this ocean of sloshing colour his body is numb, transparent, odourless to him, but he can watch the map of his neon guts flash and slither like the sign outside a pinball parlour – the bile route in electric blue one second, lip-gloss red the next, the sluices of booze and pills in cloudy white, his seething bloodstream a bolted gunmetal grey. When that snail-paced spaceship in
2001
goes by, he imagines himself plunging through a massive glass pane in the black and outer ether; plunging through it with his knees tucked into his chest, head first with the glass splinters
slicing past his ears like shooting stars. He throws himself on the floor, again and again, heels pointing backwards like exhaust pipes behind him. He fires whole chambers of dum-dum bullets into his brain, and hollers in tongues like a born-again lunatic. The pigs and their little enquiries, fuck ’em. Bang. Old people, authorities, good health,
fuck
it all. Bang. The future the past my lungs my heart my nerves,
fuck ’em. Bang
. And Ivy, Ivy Mills,
FUCK HER. BANG
. He blasts and reels and thrashes and lunges about. His knees and the palms of his hands scrape and bruise and bleed, but he just can’t feel; in those blinks of jagged time, with the bourbon and the black beauties and the heat of his rage as his nuclear fuel, there’s no time for reason or respectability or conscience or disappointed adults. He’s doing it mindlessly, meaninglessly, convulsively, like a biker on acid, like an embattled knight, blind and deaf and sweating bullets inside his helmet. Like Keef, he’s abandoning himself, at long last, to his own thing.

IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT HE WAS HAVING THE WORST TIME
of his life with her, it always struck him, when he stole a glance, how simply beautiful Ivy was, with that leaping polecat nose of hers and that tussock of bracken-brown hair. His chest swelled up with a shout of joy. He had to clamp his jaw shut. Suppressed, the shout dissolved like intoxicating bubbles throughout his flesh, causing his limbs to tingle, and leaving him weak with anticipation.

Baimy Goldfarb’s Holiday Season party, and Robbie knew how everyone would envy him for owning such a beauty. But Ivy chose an armchair that sat only one, and he was forced to kneel at her feet like an obedient puppy.

“Let’s play the game,” she said, “where we invent characters and meet again for the first time.”

So, Robbie thought sadly, it wasn’t good enough any more for them to be just Robbie and Ivy. He shrugged, and watched as she retreated still further from him.

“Hi there, guy.” Silky Ivy, like she’s done this before. “You know anyone here?”

“No way, I don’t know nobody, hostie,” Robbie said, putting heavy inflections on the words, pepsi-style:
Hi don know no-boddee
. He’d do his best to play. He’d be Gaston. Just to check.

“Gotta light, man?” Ivy held out a joint. “Boring fucken party or what?”

Chrissake, he thought, who’s she being? She’s so excited she’s just about got goose bumps.

“Ayy, tabernacle, it might develop.”
Tabarnac, hit might developp
. He watched her beadily, and there was no doubt: she was aroused. Her lips were swollen like the lobes of a Red Delicious apple, a dimple in the middle where moments ago the stem had attached it to the branch of the tree. Her eyelids drifted drowsily down, like leaves in a humid orchard. She put the joint in her mouth and drew it out to wet the rolling paper. Then she did the same to Robbie’s index finger. He could smell her saliva, rich, like mulched earth.

Trying now to make conversation, but nothing comes, and she just sits there looking like death warmed-over. Occasionally, she blows her bangs off her forehead. He’s searching, really riffling through his mind for something, anything to say. It’s an incredible sensation, being utterly blank like this. And being stoned makes him hyperaware of being utterly blank. Well, maybe this is what it’s really like to be Gaston, arf arf. He finishes his beer, fuel for thought, maybe. But it’s like the Earth has stopped spinning, and every subject that ever existed has flown off the face of the planet.

He goes to the fridge for fresh beers, where Brat says in his ear, “She’s not overly cute, but –
coochie coochie coo.”

And Robbie snaps back, “Don’t razz me, man. That’s not what our thing’s about. I don’t give two shits if she’s cute.”

Brat takes Robbie upstairs to meet his grandmother. She’s sitting alone in her room, knitting. There’s so much wool in her lap, and she’s so round and compact and fleecy, Robbie has the impression that she’s knitting herself. She looks up, and listens to Brat with applied concentration, nodding after every word and looking at Robbie like he were the Eighth Wonder of the World. Robbie smiles a lot. His face hurts doing it.

“She’s deaf as a coot,” Brat says.

“Are you behaving yourselves?” the old lady says.

“NICE AS PIE, GRANDMOTHER
,” Brat shouts.

Downstairs, the party has taken off. Several couples are making out on the couch, several ashtrays have coughed up their contents on the carpet, and someone has knocked over the Chanukah bush. Robbie goes to the stereo, rudely lifts some fucking disco piece of shit off the turntable, and puts on the Bones instead. From across the room, Ivy makes a grave face and thumbs up, and begins to bob her head determinedly. He sits down again and strokes her shin. With fresh hope, he goes, “I would like join de club of your brudder.”

Ivy looks at him for several beats, her head still bobbing. She looks really stupid, Robbie thinks, much too intense. Then she says, “God. You’re a complete and total idiot, you know that? Ever since we fucked, up against the playground wall, I’ve wanted to kill myself.
L’enfer c’est les autres
, do you understand
dat?”

“Sure,” Robbie says, shaken, unsure if she’s talking to him or to Gaston. Is that what they did
, fuck against the playground wall?
Or is she just testing him? He should have thought of that, and now he’s in too deep. His nervous system feels like it’s short-circuiting, burning his flesh from the inside. “Right. Dat bad, huh? I shoulda tought of dat.”

“No, you shouldn’t, Robbie. You think too much, that’s your problem. Don’t dream it. Be it. That’s existentialism. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Yeah.” He’s lost his grip on his character completely now. “I know what you mean. It’s like sometimes I feel like smashing things. I want to throw things around the room, but I’m, I…”

While he searches for the right words, Ivy lifts her beer bottle over her head and whips it clear across the room at a glass-front cabinet filled with chinaware. The crash brings even Brat’s
grandmother, fretting, to the top of the stairs. The whole party stands around the shattered glass and froth on the carpet, silently, and then turns to Ivy and Robbie. Ivy’s tugging at her hair, making fleabitten ears, and grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“Time to disappear,” she says, sweeps up her overcoat and flies out of the house.

Robbie lingers. He’s worried that people will think they’re breaking up. Grandma Goldfarb is hysterical. She shrieks and beats at him with her cane and drives him out the front door.

Outside it’s quiet, way below zero. Under the late-night crushed-ice sky, Ivy’s on her back in the snow with her winter clothes scattered all around. A broken column of breath rises from her mouth. She’s laughing so hard she’s barely making a sound. When she notices Robbie standing there, she claps her red, mittenless hands and scoops snow up at him and manages, “And I bet you were terribly worried what everyone in there thought, too!”

Robbie forces a laugh and sits on top of her and beats her up playfully. She resists ferociously, shoves his nose with the butt of her palm.

“Oww! Hey,” he cries. “We’re being
convulsive
now – right?”

“Not at all. Or at least, I’m glad I don’t have to spell it out for you. Now, will you please get off of me.”

Charcoal on his fingers, he spent most afternoons the week preceding Xmas holidays sketching Ivy in the attic. He had heaps of studies of her now, in all her moods – Ivy looking distant, Ivy being moody, Ivy brooding, Ivy being morose, Ivy guarding a secret, Ivy with an abstract thought, Ivy saturated with liquor and longing, Ivy doing her batik, absolutely nude.

He asked her if she was addicted to smack. She said, “God, no. You know me.”

“Ha! That’s what everybody…”

Ivy’s response to that was to look up from her batik, and gaze through the window with a flinch of irritation. Then, just as he expected her to dunk the canting into the molten wax and bend over the cloth again, she sighed and said, “God. What makes people dangerous addicts is not having stuff around to chip. I have all I want. Only problem I get is, well, constipation. Real bad, you have no idea. The other day I had to pull the log out with my fingers.”

As for joining her, meanwhile – forget it. He was paranoid of needles to begin with, but he also considered himself a real smart head, a most discerning individual, to never even smoke the hard stuff or skinpop it or anything stupid like that. K, to explain: some stones are cool, ’cause the drugs will do the thinking for you in times of stress, of which there are many during the teens; you don’t always feel too clever – in fact sometimes you feel dumb as a dog – but at least when you’re stoned, the blues zip by like lightning. Time is your friend, for once. Anyway, here are some of the drugs he figured a person can handle in moderation: Maryjane, obviously, kif too, honey oil, all that. Bennies of any variety (blackbirds, cartwheels, cranks, dexies, greenies, jelly babies, lid-poppers, pink amps, green amps, crystal meth, you name it). What else – snappers, gunk, stinkweed. All the kitchen conveniences: catnip, mellow yellow, wild lettuce, kola nuts, nutmeg, parsley, fennel, dill. And the stuff in the cabinet; paregoric and Valium and Demerol. What else? Yellow jackets, Christmas trees, goofers, Mexican reds, red devils, rainbows, Seconal. Canary Island broom, sweet flag, calea, California poppies, camphor, betel nuts. Jeez, what else: wedgies – you know, flats of various kinds like sunshine, pearly gates, blue cheer, windowpane, strawberry fields, purple
microdot. Then all the alphabet:
MDA, STP, PCP, DMT, MBD, DOM
. Ummm. Mesc, ludes, mandrakes, quacks, laughing gas, peyote, passionflower, percs, magic mushrooms. Most of that, if you’re sensible, like Robbie, and don’t overdo it and don’t mix too many of them together at once or with booze or nothing, is cool. Go ahead, he’d say, try ’em all. You’re only young once.

But Robbie did have a bottom line of
KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN
items: death’s head, because, well, the name speaks for itself. Ahh… what else? It was a very short list. Hard to think. Belladonna, that’s pretty dumb, unless you want to look like the Bride of Frankenstein with a wicked hangover. Black Henbane. Spanish fly, but that doesn’t do nothing, anyways. Cocaine’s too expensive, so he’ll cross that bridge when he gets to it. Opium, well, you almost never see it. Except when you know Ivy. And if you do and you do it, your stomach feels like the bottom of a bird cage saturated in fermented parrot droppings. And top of the list, the
numero uno
no-no, is junk. Who can really handle it, except Keef Richards, and he regularly flushes his blood out at a Swiss clinic and never had to hang out on the Main at Ste-Catherine at midnight to score some horse that you just know is going to be cut with baby laxative. Why bother? Everybody knows it’ll drag you down. Just look at Ivy, fuck.