like the images in the eye of a bluebottle fly.
The city was still blindingly bright, packed with people, and hot as an oven. It was as if humidity had an arse and had squatted down right over Peel and Ste-Catherine. Cars flashed in the glare. The tar on the roads was soft. Office buildings exhaled their dry, dead breath onto the sidewalks through rumbling grills. He walked with his hair loose and his shirt flapping open, combing the people-streams hopelessly, foolishly, for Ivy, his heart lurching like that of a dumb lost beast whenever someone with her gait, her hair, her pale complexion bobbed up in the crowds.
His tongue scooping psychedelic camel-dungy mushroom-slime from his teeth, now he’s on vulcanized feet, numbly bumping into people as they loom up stretched or squeezed, like versions of himself in a fun-house mirror. Catches blips of conversation in his sponge ears, bubbles of gummy telekinesis like the speech balloons that float around in cartoons. HEY!
YOUNG MAN! YOU LOOK LIKE YOU’RE IN NEED OF
SALVATION! Laughs at a sun – and meths-crazed rummy who’s stopped traffic, kneeling down in the middle of the street to worship a bus. Robbie’s bent on despising him until the pigs come along to infringe upon the stinky old guy’s liberties, at which point he asserts a sudden kinship by standing next to the cruiser; Robbie the civil watchdog, eyes as big as saucers, monitoring police brutalities.
He buys a can of beer and stops in Dominion Square to play chess with old Joe Smolij, the rubby with the brambled beard andthe SMASH CRASH GAMBIT sweatshirt, as blackened with street-grime and oil as the undercarriage of a diesel truck, who keeps up a running commentary above the din of traffic throughout games he never loses. “Make a moof make a moof,” Joe says, stamping a pawn onto his corrugated checkerboard and punching the stop-clock. “Time is money. Money is freedom. Oh oh oh no no – never expose your king, boy without a brain. Some patriot, some colonial, ha! You boss, but don’t feel bad. Nobody think fast in this heat.”
“Wow.” Robbie stares at his paralyzed pieces, barely out of the gate, his beer can still cool between his thighs. Fool’s mate. Joe’s lungs are obviously custom-finished to process carbon monoxide to his brain. “Fuck.”
Joe looks hard at Robbie, scratches a sunburnt potato of a nose. “I don’t make no boozy moofs. I don’t get angry so quick.”
Robbie’s taken aback by the answer. He’s not angry with Joe. He
thought
he was enjoying himself. He forks out his dollar, smiling to prove it, says goodbye and strides on, loving the tickle of sweat at the back of his neck, running his fingers up his slick spine, rolling past soft rubber skyscrapers under a flexible sky. From University Avenue, where the highway deposits drivers downtown, he trucks westward to Atwater, where Canada’s first McDonald’s is pumping out its patented sweet greasy-meaty smell. And here, too, is the Forum, home of the Habs. Home of the Habs, yes, but more significantly, where the Bones played in the 120 degree heat for an hour and twenty-three magnificent minutes back in the summer of ’72: for blocks in all directions, the sashed and macraméd windows of apartments had been propped open with loudspeakers heralding the group’s arrival, the marquee featuring their name the way a church posts a Sunday sermon. Within, the stage was a dragon writhing in a bath of blood, Spit Swagger’s testicles dangling like a sack of tennisballs down one leg of his white, sequinned jumpsuit. The show was two hours late; rumour had it Keef had fainted backstage.
From drugs, I imagine
, Mom said.
Yeah
, Robbie said, saluting with clenched fist,
from drugs
. And when he got home, he discovered his sweat had dyed his thighs and penis a jeany blue. All this, by the way, was when Robbie was the Bones’ biggest fan, bar only Ivy. Now, of course, he hates Keef’s guts and for some very good reasons, reasons he
The city was still blindingly bright, packed with people, and hot as an oven. It was as if humidity had an arse and had squatted down right over Peel and Ste-Catherine. Cars flashed in the glare. The tar on the roads was soft. Office buildings exhaled their dry, dead breath onto the sidewalks through rumbling grills. He walked with his hair loose and his shirt flapping open, combing the people-streams hopelessly, foolishly, for Ivy, his heart lurching like that of a dumb lost beast whenever someone with her gait, her hair, her pale complexion bobbed up in the crowds.
His tongue scooping psychedelic camel-dungy mushroom-slime from his teeth, now he’s on vulcanized feet, numbly bumping into people as they loom up stretched or squeezed, like versions of himself in a fun-house mirror. Catches blips of conversation in his sponge ears, bubbles of gummy telekinesis like the speech balloons that float around in cartoons. HEY!
YOUNG MAN! YOU LOOK LIKE YOU’RE IN NEED OF
SALVATION! Laughs at a sun – and meths-crazed rummy who’s stopped traffic, kneeling down in the middle of the street to worship a bus. Robbie’s bent on despising him until the pigs come along to infringe upon the stinky old guy’s liberties, at which point he asserts a sudden kinship by standing next to the cruiser; Robbie the civil watchdog, eyes as big as saucers, monitoring police brutalities.
He buys a can of beer and stops in Dominion Square to play chess with old Joe Smolij, the rubby with the brambled beard andthe SMASH CRASH GAMBIT sweatshirt, as blackened with street-grime and oil as the undercarriage of a diesel truck, who keeps up a running commentary above the din of traffic throughout games he never loses. “Make a moof make a moof,” Joe says, stamping a pawn onto his corrugated checkerboard and punching the stop-clock. “Time is money. Money is freedom. Oh oh oh no no – never expose your king, boy without a brain. Some patriot, some colonial, ha! You boss, but don’t feel bad. Nobody think fast in this heat.”
“Wow.” Robbie stares at his paralyzed pieces, barely out of the gate, his beer can still cool between his thighs. Fool’s mate. Joe’s lungs are obviously custom-finished to process carbon monoxide to his brain. “Fuck.”
Joe looks hard at Robbie, scratches a sunburnt potato of a nose. “I don’t make no boozy moofs. I don’t get angry so quick.”
Robbie’s taken aback by the answer. He’s not angry with Joe. He
thought
he was enjoying himself. He forks out his dollar, smiling to prove it, says goodbye and strides on, loving the tickle of sweat at the back of his neck, running his fingers up his slick spine, rolling past soft rubber skyscrapers under a flexible sky. From University Avenue, where the highway deposits drivers downtown, he trucks westward to Atwater, where Canada’s first McDonald’s is pumping out its patented sweet greasy-meaty smell. And here, too, is the Forum, home of the Habs. Home of the Habs, yes, but more significantly, where the Bones played in the 120 degree heat for an hour and twenty-three magnificent minutes back in the summer of ’72: for blocks in all directions, the sashed and macraméd windows of apartments had been propped open with loudspeakers heralding the group’s arrival, the marquee featuring their name the way a church posts a Sunday sermon. Within, the stage was a dragon writhing in a bath of blood, Spit Swagger’s testicles dangling like a sack of tennisballs down one leg of his white, sequinned jumpsuit. The show was two hours late; rumour had it Keef had fainted backstage.
From drugs, I imagine
, Mom said.
Yeah
, Robbie said, saluting with clenched fist,
from drugs
. And when he got home, he discovered his sweat had dyed his thighs and penis a jeany blue. All this, by the way, was when Robbie was the Bones’ biggest fan, bar only Ivy. Now, of course, he hates Keef’s guts and for some very good reasons, reasons he
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