Kicking Tomorrow (30 page)

Grumble grumble like that, and when other tenants stepped by, especially Mr. and Mrs. Grissom, he felt bitterly degraded.

By December it had looked like it might be a mild winter. Or it might not. It was indecisive, which meant that the snow Robbie had so meticulously shaved away in the mornings, melted and trickled across the walk in the afternoons, and became a skating rink by night. Daily he chopped in a fury, sometimes taking an axe to it and hewing up chips of concrete and ice that flew in all directions.

Two weeks before Christmas he’d still not paid any rent. Queenie Graves looked out of her window and invited him in for
a cup of rosehip tea laced with rum. He gratefully wrapped his fingers around the cup and sat on her couch. Queenie turned the volume down on The Newlywed Game and sat beside him with her knees pressed primly together, her cup balanced uncertainly there. Her freckled cheeks were glowing like stewed apples, and Robbie guessed that she was already halfway through the pot. She watched him while he sipped, her eyes roving all over his face. He looked back at her, taking details in – the fine web of blood vessels at the edge of her nostrils, the freshly ironed creases in her jeans and George Jones T-shirt, the snail’s trail of silvery-blue eyeliner around her eyes – and the bobbing motions their four eyes were making, reminded him of moths in mid-air.

“The girls’re in school,” she said at last. “The littlest won’t be back till after noon.” Robbie nodded, put his nose in his cup. He looked at her bare feet. Tiny spots of dried blood speckled the skin between her ankles and knees. She smelled of clean, static-free laundry. “I know whatchou’re thinkin,” she said. “I put her in as soon’s I could, see. I’m not one of them people who claim they kin provide all the education of a child in the home. I’m only thirty-one, I don’t know everything, I’m the first to admit it. Anyways, I shouldn’t be selfish, spoilin her all the time, pickin up after her for hours on end, when she could be out learnin to take care of herself in the company of other children. By the way, I been meanin t’ask, ever since the Grissoms started complainin about you – I’d of come to your door, eh, but I don’t feel I’m in a position to invite myself over – are you
punk
, by any chance?”

FOLLOWING THE DEBACLE WITH MR. MILLS AT THE HOTEL
Bonaventure, Robbie spent the last days before New Year’s Eve moping about the house, waiting for Ivy to call. He snuck a lot of booze from Dad’s liquor cabinet, and sought solace in music, like Sartre’s sentimental idiots. He caught himself feeling grown up for having had such a heartbreak – being pleased he could feel such volumes of emotion, that he was so
convulsively
alive – and he hated himself for that. When at last Miriam called him to the phone, he had exhausted himself flailing at his pillow and weeping, the soaking self-indulgence made all the more delicious by the silence he imposed on himself to conceal his woe from the family. He rushed to pick up the receiver.

“How you
doing?”

“Oh,” Ivy replied, her voice furtive. “You know me.”

“But how are you
feeling?”

“Not a fucking thing. So stop asking. I’ve been drinking like a fish. Pure revenge, really – I’m giving the parents a taste of their own medicine. This way, at least I don’t have to
feel
, which you seem to think is so important. Anyway, listen to this:
The crimes you have commit are worse than Hitler’s you have disgrace the family I wish you have been born ugly or retarded. If you cannot
redeem yourself I will wish for your death
. A note from the mother, can you believe it? And she’s been telling all her sisters about my crimes, too. Half of Outremont now knows about Robbie’s girl. You know
Robbie
, Robbie Bookbinder, son of the famous television host, Abigail Bookbinder! I tried to leave but she caught me packing and hit me with one of my books. She doesn’t blame you, not as much as the father does, at least – she blames books. She picked up that Canadian poet you gave me, Albert Camel, but it was such a slim volume, I barely felt a thing – but the humiliation still hurt.”

Robbie was surprised that Ivy had strung so many energetic sentences together in one breath. She seemed to be enjoying the danger of the secret phone call, and the thrill of a denied romance, much more than she had ever enjoyed the so-called romance itself.

“Your mother’s a psychotic windbag,” he said.

“Oh, you’re a big help. Look, she’s not a rational person. Here’s what she told me after she hit me – she said, I
never want that you make love under my roof, I never want that you make love under Robbie’s roof If you want to make love, go in a motel
. Can you believe it? I told her that’s what we were doing, and she hit me again. Even if I run away, what am I going to do, work at one of Olly’s clubs? I just have to accept, the mother is not a rational human being. Anyway, I’m calling quickly to say I’ve got passes to the Bones concert – it’s their First Final Tour of Triumphant Return! Want to meet me? It may be the last chance you have to see me before the father locks me up with the Ursulines.”

New Year’s Eve, and the Alexis Nihon Plaza was bristling. Outdoors a freezing dark had fallen, and the sidewalks were glazed with ice. Cars jammed around the Forum, exhaust illuminated in the headlights and hugging the street, as if the cold had
made the air itself heavier. Crowds massed around the main doors, under the escalators shaped like crossed hockey sticks. Ticketless fans hung around stamping their feet, trying to outwait the scalpers who were blowing into their hands and pacing. Robbie was feeling pretty dumb; one of the heels on his cheap shankless Beatle boots had got so soggy and rotted with salt that he lost it when he leapt off the bus at Atwater. Finding himself stepping unevenly, he turned around and saw the three-inch heel standing there on the bottom step, all alone with nobody on it, as the doors closed and the bus pulled away.

The other thing to bum him out was – just as he was approaching the West entrance of the ice rink, since now he had to walk so lopsidedly, like a man on a peg-leg – the quart-size bottle of apple cider he was concealing under his parka slipped out and smashed on the sidewalk. The liquid fizzed and froze almost instantly in a thin white crust.
Major
bummer.

“Hi! I got a ride,” Ivy said, boldly handing him a roach, right there in the street. “Olly’s a personal friend of Keef’s, did I tell you? They did time together in jail!” Robbie took a toke and held her round the waist proudly. Hey, maybe they’d get in the papers! For Ivy had dyed her chopped hair electric green and stuck gold stars on her cheeks and put on one of her father’s business suits with a pair of studded motorcycle gloves, mirrored sunglasses, and a flaming eight-foot fluorescent pink boa, whose feathers fluttered off to land and extinguish in the muddy slush behind her as they walked.

The Forum’s outer halls were filled to the brim. Dad joked that rock ’n roll crowds resemble a compost heap, but Robbie enjoyed being stinky and ragged. It was an improvement, at least, over smells of Vitalis and Barbasol, which was the way he imagined those famous old hockey players in the photos on the Forum walls; he looked up at them and their coaches, all crewcuts and shiny chins, and he knew he couldn’t have hacked belonging to
that generation. He just closed his eyes as the stone came on and allowed the warm and fetid crush to carry him along down the narrow corridor.…

As the pressure squeezes tighter, he’s lifted off his feet. He can just see past the curtains, into the bright arena. Fans are hurling Frisbees and toilet rolls, and unfurling ink-blotted bed-sheet banners, while they wait for the show to begin. A recorded Bones number is pumping out from the ampstacks (the rhythm track rumoured to be the hyper-amplified heartbeat of a girl climaxing in Keef’s bed) and the atmosphere’s already hazy in the rafters. Suddenly the lights go down and a grid of spotlights switch on like skeletal pillars in a massive miasmic cathedral. And the crowd explodes. Still stuck in the corridor, people shove harder, pushing up on each other’s shoulders to see; it’s as if this giant music has a fist, and is pounding on the ground to send people flying up off their feet. Ivy squeals from somewhere – under Robbie’s armpit – and pink feathers fly up. The music’s so loud it makes the air as thick as wax, plugging Robbie’s ears, unbalancing him. The guitars scream like molten plastic like blue fruit like all the sadness of his life like something enormous and soft and majestic. He wrenches his arms free and throws them up like he’s on a roller coaster.

The ushers open a door to divert the urgent flow of fans. Bodies are sucked to the right like clumps on a current, and as he goes this way, he realizes it’s the same route hockey players take to get to their dressing rooms. Fans are being herded to an entrance at the far end of this corridor to emerge, he guesses, at the east side of the stage. So this is it. His big chance, possibly his one and only. One of these doors must lead to Keef’s dressing room. All he has to do is pick the right one, and wait.

He’s alone and in darkness. The crowd’s on the other side of the door, and in this oily smelling dark a
plip plip plip
. He fumbles about. Feels sticky fur on pipes, the ribs on an aluminum cable,
the bristle of an upside-down broom. There are also rags in piles, a rock hard paintbrush, a greasy tuque. When at last he finds a switch and flicks it on to see where he is, a crown of prickling heat descends over his head and the muscles of his temples grip him like a metal helmet. He looks at the great white Zamboni, only three feet from him, its cab some six above, and his mind goes utterly blank.

The door to the corridor has no handle on this side. He bangs with his fists and shouts, but no one will ever hear him out there. He bangs again anyway, and again, then rests his forehead on the asbestos wall and looks at his shoes. His fancy duds look suddenly goatish and irrelevant: the dumb blue Beatle boots, the flared jeans with the ridiculous slogans stitched onto them –
QUESTION AUTHORITY
and
KEEF LIVES –
the big stupid studded belt slung low about his hips. He stares and stares and listens to the room hum indifferently around him. And as he hears
Keef Richards
AND THE STROLLING BONES!
take the stage in the arena, his eyes fill with tears and his mouth starts to go all wiggly.

How old is he now? Eighteen in two weeks. What’s he doing with his life?
SFA
. One hour earlier there was nothing more important in his life than seeing this concert. Now it seems like a stupid waste of time. He knows it seemed important only because, by comparison with the apathy and uselessness of his life, it’s a major event. How ridiculous. He’s read innumerable interviews with Keef, and one thing he’s noticed is that the guy can rarely remember anything he’s said or done; he’s had so many vital experiences in his life – from the Bones’ riot-ridden Central American tour, during which he threw a toilet out a hotel window and beaned a Third World dictator on the terrace below, to the time he was taken to a Monte Carlo hospital after swallowing 50cc’s of semen (the wad of Albania’s entire Tour de France bicycle team) – but because he lives such an abandoned life, doing nothing that isn’t pure creative instinct, he can’t remember
any of it. Robbie, on the other hand, is hobbled in the present by the memory of all his insignificant achievements, his every puny puerile problem and utterly uninteresting failure. He gnashes his teeth and calls himself a fuckingly fucked-up fuckup, and a dumbfuck hole in the head, a bona fide shit for brains, and more, besides. Through the door he hears the screech of a guitar solo, so loud it rides feedback’s spine. Then he begins to yell. To the rhythm of the Bones’ music that pounds on the walls and ceiling of this little box of a room, he roars blue bloody baby talk with his neck pitched back and his eyes scrunched shut. He can feel his throat heat up like a motor burning oil in first, painfully, but he’s determined to punish himself.

Half an hour later, Ivy and a security guard opened the door. Robbie was sitting up in the Zamboni’s seat.

“God. You’re unreal,” Ivy said. “You look like you’ve lost your mummy at the funfair.”

“Arf arf, so funny I forgot to laugh,” Robbie said hoarsely.

“So get down, it’s the intermission now. I’m with Olly, and you know who I just met, just one door down from here? Go on, guess. Keef Richards! The whole band, too! He was so attentive, he even invited me for a drink before they go back on. That’s now if we hurry, so let’s hurry.”

The hockey players who regularly use the dressing room would not have recognized the place, but from fan mags Robbie knew every detail of the Bones’ backstage rider by heart, and had long dreamt of seeing firsthand what he now beheld.

The neon lighting had been pulled out and replaced with black candles, tall as spears, on eight silver octopus candelabra, which were flanked by the dozen Dead Man’s Hands contracted to provide security; the skate-scraped concrete floor was covered with plush Persian cushions and carpets, and in the corner, Robbie
recognized Keef’s famous grandfather clock, whose hands had been bent around like Dali’s moustache by Dali himself. Guests sat on the floor smoking and drinking, and on the mahogany four-poster bed (the posters like May-pole penises), a girl in hot pants was giving two men in satin Bones tour jackets a blowjob; there were blood-red lava lamps arranged along the shelves where the Canadiens would normally store their gear, four state-of-the-art pinball machines, and in the showers, enough jeroboams of champagne on ice to keep the Bones’ entire entourage crazed (for if the supply ran out, the band wasn’t legally bound to play the concert).