Searching for Petronius Totem

by Peter Unwin

  I drove on, robotically. How was it possible that a love like ours, a love based on free-range blueberries, could ever come to a miserable end? How could two like-minded people who had been around the same blocks and annihilated the same tired and bogus canons of a bogus society turn on one another and betray what they had?

  Actually it was easy.

  People did it all the time:

  Adam and Eve

  Jack and Jill

  Scott and Zelda

  Mom and Dad

  Rimbaud and Verlaine

  John and Yoko

  Richard and Liz

  Anthony and Cleopatra

  Sony and Cher

  etc. and etc.

  the list goes on.

  We had been artists together back in a day when that word didn’t make you want to vomit. Elaine had worked the taverns and the old dance joints, fusing Josephine Baker dance moves with the gold-grubbing high-kicking Canadian cancan traditions. She brought old-fashioned blood-gorged erections to the flaccidity of Late Pre Post Modern Man, while I haunted the garrets and starved. I ate sardines like Modigliani, I gained the poetical insights of Verlaine and sought the visionary hunger of Simone Weil. Together, Elaine and I, we went down deep into the subterranean depths of dangerous music, forbidden texts, and greasy spoon restaurants that featured $3.99 breakfast specials, and from such feasts we constructed a society of art and regeneration. We were cave painters carrying on in the tradition of our brothers and sisters who painted the caves at Lascaux when the mastodons stomped the earth. We created images of big game animals on the walls of caves and made it possible for the clan to eat, to dream, to rub their hungry, filthy bodies together …

  Somewhere west of Sudbury, Thornstein was thrown out attempting to steal third, the radio collapsed into a white static wash, and a billboard loomed from the roadside:

  “Leggit’s Digital Catering —

  We’re More Than Just Chicken.

  Check Out Our Pulled Pork Specials.

  New Edible Platforms and Interfaces Daily”

  “You’ve got that right,” I whispered.

  I refocused on the road, and why not?

  I was driving Elaine’s car for God’s sake, the same Sable I had driven in spectacular fashion off the Skyway Bridge, a year before my first attempt to rescue Petro in Gastown. The brakes still needed fixing, the alternator had not been replaced, the solenoid switch was iffy, the windshield was cracked, and the muffler still needed work but the car was running. I checked the dials. The car had better than a quarter million miles on it. But it was still running. Like me and Elaine. I took strength from this. Life was possible, no matter what the philosophers and foreign poets were saying. In that moment in that car on that stretch of highway, life was possible.

  “Elaine,” I said, to no one. “Elaine, I love you.”

  There.

  It was true. I watched north Ontario dash backward in the rear-view mirror and engulfed myself in that woman. At one time Elaine’s artistic métier had been the numbers one through nine that she carved out of Styrofoam and heaved over the sides of bridges while dressed in a stunning turquoise bra and panty set and reciting Baudrillard backward in a very convincing bogus French accent. At some point a policeman arrested her; the affair was captured on video with Elaine smiling radiantly into the camera as a burly officer folded her into the back seat of a cruiser.

  She was going to change the world with her art and her breasts and her radical lingerie and for a time she had done that. She cleavaged the world as we know it. She flicked her hips and the Soviet Union collapsed. She slipped into a tight summer halter top and for a moment neo-liberal hegemony was brought to a standstill. She choreographed a dance number involving four fire hydrants that finally the Hamilton Fire Department attempted to have banned. When that failed they tried to bring charges against her for the sexual abuse of civic property, and when that failed they paid her three hundred and fifty dollars to jump out of a cake at a stag for a retiring superintendent.

  Then overnight she underwent a critical change. She became infected by what she called “maturity.” She began to read French critical theory. I tried to warn her but it was too late. Halfway through Guy Debord and The Society of the Spectacle she turned on me.

  “Kids,” she said. “I want them. Now!”

  THE WIND SCREAMED through the seams of the windows like it does when you get up over eighty in Elaine’s car. A dirt side road shot by. “Elaine,” I moaned, squeezing the steering wheel until my knuckles whitened. She was back in Hamilton, already shacking up with some slimeball magic realist, or worse. “Elaine,” I said again, overcome by the Elaine-ness of life, the Elaine-ness of everything. She was the mother of my children, for God’s sake. Me, her, the kids! My God.

  How the whole children thing had taken place was unclear to me. There I was at my desk filling out what I thought was a subscription-renewal form for the Times Literary Supplement. In fact the document turned out be an adoption questionnaire from the Children’s Aid Society. Elaine had cleverly embedded it on my desk amongst my papers. Two weeks after it was mailed off Elaine and I were invited to a meeting at a rundown three-storey house in the heart of Toronto’s gay-town.

  Having had several drinks beforehand I assumed I was there to give a reading from one of my books. When my name was called, or even when it wasn’t, I don’t remember, I stood up and began to read brilliantly from my masterpiece The Fly that Would Not Die for Love but Did Anyway, adopting the single malt smoothness that defines my public reading style. At once a large and rude woman with an unfortunate Vita Sackville-West hairdo instructed me to sit down. Under the table Elaine gave me one of her vicious squeezes that meant one more word out of me and she would change the locks again.

  For the following three hours two women talked nonstop about children. That sort of thing went on once a week for four months, during which the Times Literary Supplement wrapped in clear plastic resumed its appearance in my mailbox and I spent my days reading about Lady Cicely Waynflete’s role in the English suffragette movement. After four months I received an envelope in the mail containing several photographs of two dumbfounded children, a girl and a boy or vice versa, somewhere between two and four years old. I put the photos on my desk beside my computer and forgot about them until Elaine came home, went upstairs, and screamed.

  OFTEN WHEN Elaine screamed it was not a good thing for me; it meant we would end up going two three-minute rounds in the living room again. I had the sinking feeling she’d been creeping around in my computer and discovered the candid digital photos that a reader out of the swellness of her heart was emailing me. I climbed the stairs rehearsing the I’m a literary artist and you can’t judge me by the repressive and prurient attitudes of Canadian etc. etc. line. Instead of assuming a sparring stance Elaine threw her arms around me and with tears running down her face, she cried, “Oh, darling. Can you believe it?”

  “Believe what?” I said cautiously.

  6.0

  KAMP KAN LIT: THE FALL OF PETRO

  THE FIRST NIGHT of my journey in search of Petronius I slept in the back seat after pulling off on a goat trail somewhere north of the Soo. First I nosed the car down into the woods near the water and curled myself up while the stars came out and the meteorites dropped in white showers into the treetops. Crickets stridulated, the night hawks whipped through the sky high above, devouring anything that moved. Lake Superior smashed, hissed etc., and I snored through all of it.

  By dawn I was awake and on the road. I had made up my mind to go no further than Kenora. Before the kids Elaine and I had watched immense sturgeons in Kenora, rolling in the bay like whales. Petro, I knew, would not go further than Kenora. He would get himself a room at the old Kenricia Hotel where the bootleggers had once smoked cigars. He was an Easterner by nature and would go no further west unless he got paid for it, and there was no way that was going to happen.

  Pete’s rise into fame as Petronius Totem, author of Ten Thousand
Busted Chunks, had been real enough, even dizzying. For about three weeks he was seated on white lounge chairs, sipping rarefied bottled water on the sets of afternoon TV talk shows hosted by real American women with enormous hair, all of them yammering on about the heartbreaking honesty of Ten Thousand Busted Chunks. And then …

  Then he fell.

  There was the whole world going nuts over Busted Chunks, and within four months it was all over; grandmothers in Grande Prairie, Alberta, were on the phone to afternoon radio talk shows, demanding he be put to death. Slowly.

  All this came about on the heels of wild and various reports originating from a youth writing workshop outside of Edmonton. It was there the author of Ten Thousand Busted Chunks, inflamed by alcohol, drugs, art, literature, and things even worse than that, became the wild-eyed charismatic leader of a literary sex cult who did unspeakable things to young girls. None of this was true. I know because I was there. Like Petronius I was a formally invited and paid-for writing instructor at the same writers’ camp.

  I had arrived late, following a marathon but leisurely five-day drive from Hamilton. Elaine had resumed speaking to me three months after shooting me with her Belgian assault rifle. A hole had opened in her anger toward me. Our wounds had healed somewhat and she had finally allowed me to move back in. Then all of a sudden she stopped speaking to me on the Ontario–Manitoba border after a poisonous argument over whether the novelist Jaan Kross was a Belarusian, or an Estonian (he was Belarusian, so I was right). She de-car-ed with Maddy and Alex in Regina to stay with a friend from her university days, and I drove on with my jaw set tight. I arrived at Kamp Kan Lit, exhausted, took to my room, and fell asleep.

  At three in the morning I was wakened by the tail end of one of those foot-stomping Alberta-style parties in which somebody always gets divorced, drowned, or shot. The commotion began with a familiar boozy argument taking place in the hall outside my door. Karen, the supervisor, was giving it to Petronius.

  “I don’t care how drunk you are,” she hissed. “You are not going to sleep with that girl. That girl is seventeen years old, I went to grad school with her mother. Do you understand? We studied bell hooks together, we shared our copy of The Second Sex, we debated Shulamith Firestone, and we refused to sleep with our professors, Petro, can you believe that? Really, can you? Even our female professors, that’s how committed we were. She put her daughter into this program in the hope that for two weeks in the summer a seventeen-year-old girl might escape the company of beer-swilling jocks who don’t know a villanelle from a haiku and who care more about who scored the overtime goal in game seven of the 1982 Stanley Cup than they do about the writings of Jean Rhys.”

  “Who did score that goal?” I heard Petro ask.

  “See? Trick question, stupid. The game was decided in regulation.”

  “Game seven? Nineteen eighty-two? Wait a minute. Are you sure?”

  “I will not allow that girl to get taken in by some Ted Hughes lookalike who has written an overrated book and performed a few conceptual art gimmicks and now presumes that his grubby little dick is a magic wand and all he has to do is wave it around in a girl’s face, and she will somehow transform magically into a woman. Forget it.”

  “Karen, Karen, Karen.” Petro’s voice assumed that late-night, pre-morning whiskey-soaked somnambulance that I’d heard before. “You’re so beautiful, Karen. Tennyson was wrong, I mean he wasn’t entirely wrong, your hair is your crowning glory, but did anyone ever tell you that you have the most gorgeous ass in the world?”

  “Yes, in fact more than once. The high ambassador to Sweden told me that. In two languages, neither of which you understand. And he was sober.”

  I knew enough of Karen to know that she was a hot-blooded meta-female from Calgary who sported a shotgun wound on the small of her back put there by a Cree woman who believed, correctly, that Karen had slept with her husband. As a younger woman she had deliberately made a noble effort to bed what she called every man of genius in the province. “My personal vow of chastity,” she told me afterwards over drinks and without the slightest hint of irony. “Who would have thunk it?” She was a poet in the tradition of Sappho: all thigh-soaked lyrics and bursting nipples. Her books were banned in Drumheller, Alberta, of which she was very proud. Even her mother was proud of that. I also knew of Karen that she had once climbed up on stage in a Winnipeg bar and put a serious beating on the bass player who was, at the time, her third husband.

  She was not a prude.

  And she was also adamant that Petronius Totem was not about to have his way with that little girl with the slight gap between her teeth, even if she did possess a Chinese ideogram tattooed on the small of her back above her La Senza thong that had been tugged repeatedly into strategic display.

  “She is seventeen,” Karen whispered. This was followed by the sound of her mounting the steps outside my door and the indignant helpless fury of a woman who has just received an unsolicited spank on the bum. “You prick,” she snarled.

  “Karen, darling, honey. You have the most beautiful ass in the world. Believe me, that thing is more beautiful than a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water. It is more beautiful than a thousand alcoholic dawns. More beautiful than petals on a wet, black bough, I mean, baby, I have seen the best asses of my generation run screaming down Negro streets, I have measured out my life in —”

  “Shut up,” she pleaded. “Shut up.”

  “Three white leopards sitting under a juniper tree ain’t got nothing on —”

  “Petro …”

  “Karen, please, show me your ass, please. Make me immortal. Half of it, just half of it. The top half.”

  “For Christ’s sakes.”

  “Fine, the bottom half.”

  What I heard next was the sound of zippers flying open, of one human body or perhaps two collapsing against a thin wall, followed by Petronius unleashing something dramatic from Marlowe. Karen was barking like a fox. She was a trooper, Karen, and she would jump on a live grenade to stop a crime against nature from taking place on her watch. It was intolerable to her that this improbably-celebrated-down-at-the-heel-failing-roué with a failing liver, failing hair, failing memory, and failing everything, should take his pleasure from that swelling girl.

  Petronius never did, but it didn’t matter.

  IT WAS THE LAST DAY of camp. The week was over, our work was done. We had done what artists do. We had thrown gasoline on the fire of young kids. We made clever statements about the meaning of life and art etc. We dismissed semiotics and went into the mountains and acted foolishly. Now we sat on the deck beneath a serious display of northern lights drinking beer, all of us except for Roddy Trumbaugh who had sworn off drinking beer altogether after breaking two teeth and losing part of his right ear in an incident he couldn’t remember, and Karen who only drank martinis, and only when she mixed them herself. Paul Skreeling, the songwriter and part-time milk farmer, was playing acoustic guitar and singing a stirring fragment of a song that went, “there ain’t no fire like no fire at all.” An odd, muscular graphic novelist with biker tattoos, a shaved head, and a deadly-looking Bowie knife attached to his belt was singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in a castrato pitch, and sketching in a notebook. I was working, beatnik-style, gently but to no avail, on a pair of tom-toms. Karen was off on the far end of the porch murmuring erotic nighttime nothings into a phone and speaking loud enough so that Petronius could hear her.

  “You’d have to get me drunk to do that to me, sweetheart. I don’t even think that’s legal in Alberta.” The delicious champagne gurgle of her laughter filled the evening. Abruptly she stopped. Deadly serious she said, “I’m just kidding. I’d do that cold sober if you want me too. That too,” she added. “I don’t care if it’s legal or not.” She was staring directly at Petro. It looked like she wanted to kill him. It seemed there were more and more people who wanted to do that.

  Then from the bushes the buck appeared and stood stone-still in the field. A towering fo
urteen-point rack sprouted from its head and a white tuft curled from its neck, giving the beast the look of a powerful mandarin. Clearly it had no interest in writers, artists, columnists, educators, and windbags of all stripes. Just standing there it surpassed anything we had ever done. All our “edgy accounts of life in the fast lane” could not compare with what was out there in that field in the unfathomable soul of that animal.

  It stood motionless as the red strands of the northern lights swished across the universe, brushing its back with ionic tentacles and shooting up again. Someone whistled. The buck cocked an ear, not in our direction, but toward the trees. A white shiver of light shot straight down to the earth and illuminated the animal as it went from us without concern. It was gone; it had entered another dimension where we could not follow.

  That’s when the Thing landed on the porch.

  It landed with a thump, and a short skid.

  We stared at it. This was the logical procession in a series of events that went from a starry night of the aurora, to the fourteen-point buck, to the unknown Thing landing on the porch. In short, we were drunk.

  “What is that?” Paul Skreeling tucked his guitar under an arm and reached for the Thing.

  “Careful!” Petronius leapt to his feet, and like the mixed-martial artist that he wasn’t, began to warily circle the Thing.