Searching for Petronius Totem

by Peter Unwin

  Karen snapped the phone on her paramour. She was Kamp Superintendent and the Thing, any Thing really, was her responsibility. She was in charge of all Things and she was already taking a dim view of this one.

  “It’s a totemic mutilation,” cried Petronius.

  Whatever it was I was relieved to see that it wasn’t another one of those crow-like cyborg edible prototypes that had crashed into Elaine’s living room.

  “It’s a teddy bear is what it is,” said the knife-wielding graphic novelist with the tattoos, crouching forward from his chair and skewering the Thing with his Bowie knife. Like many graphic novelists he possessed advanced military training, and now swivelled in a crouched position, as if evading sniper fire. He lifted the Thing up for inspection on the tip of his knife.

  In fact it was a teddy bear, but not the sort of teddy bear that gets tossed onto a deck in the dawning twilight of a heartfelt teenage writers’ camp in the foothills of the Rockies. To begin with, the teddy bear’s groin area was tightly bound in a frothy pair of panties that featured a Smiley Face stitched to the front. Where normally would be found a cute pair of black button eyes were now only scars, the eyes ripped out and replaced with two crushed cigarette butts. Its mouth, the Smiley part, was smeared with lipstick and then savagely stitched together with black thread.

  “It’s goth,” said Karen.

  “It’s post-goth,” offered Paul Skreeling.

  Then the keening started.

  PROBABLY IT IS NOT RIGHT to dignify the sound that floated up over the field that night as keening. It was a noise, female in emanation, and contained the eerie sound of universal female grief, although that sound quickly evolved into the universal sound made by thirty-five teenage girls who are roaring drunk for the first time in their lives.

  Petronius was first to the rail. “My God. Look at this. They’ve all gone feral. All the little angels have gone feral. Look at them!”

  Karen flung herself to the railing next to him. “Jesus Christ,” she gasped. “They’re hammered.”

  Below us on a thick field of mowed grass the girls of the Third Annual Calgary Literary Retreat reeled, roared, and pirouetted in a drunken midsummer imitation of the Rites of Spring. Some held hands, others clutched teddy bears, and a few waved twenty-six-ounce bottles of vodka around in front of them like sparklers. All were dressed in pastel-coloured nightgowns, pyjamas, bathrobes, T-shirts, and other improvised bedtime outfits. Some were held upright by their colleagues, two lay flat on their faces, a half dozen held hands and danced in a circle. At the perimeter of the field, three girls on their hands and knees threw up on the grass. Collectively they unleashed their chorus of moaning, keening, and weird fluting shouts of “omigod oh my God” that gave way to a desperate cry of what sounded to me like, “Petro, we love you. We love you, Petro.”

  From the deck Petronius threw his arms straight up and punched the night with his fists. “Young ladies of the soaking field,” he boomed. “I love you in all your naked earnest hunger, but trust me, you do not love me. You are only attempting to fill a void formed by brainless video games, absent fathers, disappointed mothers, and airbrushed pop idols who perform in unspeakably bad boy bands, a sanitized, instagrammatic national culture of hygiene, celebrity, and digitized reality. You don’t love me. You’re just saying that because God is dead, and your rituals no longer sustain you in any meaningful way, your national literature has failed you, and because you’re pissed out of your skulls.”

  “They got into our booze,” Karen moaned. “They got into the instructors’ booze.” Poor Karen. It was not her fault that the civic-minded planners of Kamp Kan Lit could not fit the instructors’ refrigerator inside the lounge without blocking the door in violation of local fire codes, and had elected to place it outside on a covered porch. It was not her fault that it was stuffed from top to bottom with exotic Russian vodkas, British gins, Mexican tequilas, Canadian whiskeys, Cuban rums, and an unregistered bottle of mescal wrapped up tight in brown security paper on which someone had magic-markered a skull and crossbones. The only blame to be laid at Karen’s feet was that she harboured a heartfelt ambition to usher a generation of Canadian girls into womanhood by exposing them to the works of Zora Neale Hurston. It had all gone wrong and now her ambitions lay out in the field throwing up, moaning, and professing their undying love for Petronius Totem of all people.

  Karen set off in a furious hurry to mobilize her staff, five young women of late- or post-university age, all of them darkly beautiful, and given to implausible displays of skin around the midriff. Their task was to make sure the students took their meds and did not get drunk, pregnant, eaten by a cougar, or lost in the mountains. Karen found them gathered in their dorm plugged into miniature electronic devices, smoking generously from an impressive bag of BC hydroponic weed. High as kites, they perused a stack of virtual messages pouring in overnight, every night, from a small army of men, as well as an actual army of men and not a small one either, a steady flow of pornographic emails, pornographic voicemail, pornographic text messages all originating from the Canadian 53rd Armoured Division stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan. None of it seemed strange to them. It happened all the time, an avalanche of erotic admiration streamed in from all corners of the globe.

  Karen loomed in the doorway. “What are you doing?”

  “We’re clearing our pornographic emails,” answered one of the young women, brightly. “See?” She held up the screen of her phone revealing the pixellated image of male limbs with a dark grotty spot situated between them.

  In seconds Karen had them outside with flashlights, rounding up her charges. A mizzling rain had begun to fall, and as it did so a film crew from CBC Calgary arrived. The doors of their Jeep flew open, and out they came, hoisting fully loaded cameras, hitting the ground faster than the infantry at Juno Beach.

  The girls raced about the field like ponies, breaking into small groups, huddled together with their heads thrown back, mouths open to the falling drops. From across the field rose the moaning and screaming of soaked girls wearing pyjamas and stumbling in the grass clutching bottles of Smirnoff and intoning the name of Petronius Totem. The TV crew couldn’t get enough of it. “Petrogate” was about to begin.

  I watched from the deck. Karen was on the grass below ordering the girls inside, pleading with them. Slowly, in a staggered parade, they made their way around the corner of our residence and trudged back to their dorm.

  While they did that Petronious emerged out of the dorm and back on to the deck where he ignited an enormous joint with his signature pearl-handled lighter. His free hand pulled the cap from an ornate silver whiskey flask. “They don’t really love me, of course,” he said, sipping. “They love the idea of me. The brand. The Petro brand. Got to have a brand, eh Jack?” He smiled faintly and handed me the flask. “Can’t be a poet without a brand. Isn’t that right?”

  “Petro,” I said, “this is not good.”

  He nodded and was suddenly serious. “This is nothing. Wait for the headlines: ‘Underage girls soaking wet for Petronius Totem.’”

  6.1

  THE FALL (FIRST OF MANY)

  PETRONIUS TOTEM and Kamp Kan Lit were pilloried on radio phone-ins, condemned from the newsroom, from the pulpit, from the lecture hall of Tim Hortons and Coffee Time, from behind the cash registers at Value Village, and from both floors of the provincial and federal legislatures. Never had such a flagrant waste of taxpayers’ money come to light. Never had such an assault been launched against the family, common decency, and western womanhood and etc. “Underage Girls Soaking Wet for Petronius Totem” boomed the Winnipeg Free Press. An apoplectic lady columnist with unfortunate hair accused Petro of conducting “a literary sex-slave colony” and demanded that he be “kneecapped, chemically castrated, and forced to do community service.” A determined, single-minded toupee-wearing reporter from the Biggar Weekly News, Petro’s nemesis, discovered that Petronius was also the author of The Perfect Blowjob: A User’s Guide, a home
made chapbook written and published by Petronius with a small unsuspecting grant from a charitable foundation.

  Then Ten Thousand Busted Chunks disappeared from county libraries and from the shelves of Catholic and public school boards. A new vigilance was demanded toward what one MLA ominously referred to as “the teaching of literary arts to young people.”

  “I don’t claim to know what a terza rima is,” thundered the outraged member of the legislative assembly from Drumheller West. “But I certainly do not want my daughter exposed to one and I don’t think you do either.”

  It might have all blown over, mercifully overshadowed by the ongoing story of the Toronto police officer who murdered his girlfriend and drywalled her up in the basement of his house alongside his ex-wife. But following a head count by Karen’s staff, two girls could not be accounted for and within an hour a CH-149 Cormorant search-and-rescue helicopter was whacking above the foothills lending the whole affair a brooding military aspect. The two missing girls came back an hour before dawn, having spent five hours staggering in a dense bush of wolf willows, but by that time the chopper was in the air, sniffer dogs were in the bush, and a contingent of Calgary police officers were undertaking a quadrant search, shoulder to shoulder.

  At four-thirty in the morning the girls emerged from the woods onto the manicured grounds of Kamp Kan Lit and staggered straight into a phalanx of cameras. Hungover, dehydrated, sleepless, and scratched around the neck and shoulders, they endured several minutes of withering camera fire that resulted in a heartbreaking and prize-winning shot of the two of them in tattered nightshirts and shining braces, looking as vulnerable as baby raccoons. The photograph found its way into just about every newspaper in the country and several outside the country, including an English-language weekly in Kuala Lumpur.

  PETRO WENT UNDERGROUND and I drove to Regina and reconnected with Elaine and the kids. Even as we drove back to Hamilton the car radio broadcast demanded for a public inquiry. The director of the Alberta Federation for the Arts resigned, and moved to British Columbia, presumably to grow weed. Poor Karen was sacked. Petronius Totem was eventually discovered playing Grand Theft Auto in an Edmonton strip bar, where he was handcuffed and brought in for questioning by the RCMP.

  From the beginning it was assumed that Petro had been force-feeding these poor girls at Kamp Kan Lit a steady diet of post-communist vodka and deflowering them with the speed and efficiency of an electric weed whacker. In truth Petro had been giving a well-attended morning workshop that emphasized the moral responsibilities of the artist in a world of commodified cultural junk. As far as Petronius was concerned, art, music, literature, and books in particular had become the new Prozac for the people and he wanted us off our meds, now. As the self-proclaimed “kaffeine of Kanada,” he wanted us fornicating and screaming in the street, sleeping with one another’s spouses, bleeding out from gut wounds, and shooting each other at close range like proper Canadians. “What I want,” he admonished, “is civilization. At least a bloody semblance of it.”

  “The only principled stance open to any artist working today,” Petro’s black boots clashed on the floor and his otherwise stentorian voice gave way to a swampy smoker’s cough, “is to produce nothing at all, or to produce it and then destroy it. Otherwise it sits on the heap with the rest of it. The dung heap. The spectacle of shit!” He stared wildly around a room filled with quivering young people.

  In fairness to Petro he had committed himself to a body of art that, with the notable exception of Ten Thousand Busted Chunks, was entirely ephemeral. Consisting mainly of the spoken word it vanished the moment it plopped forth from the human mouth. There were the performance pieces, including the Jesuitical Condom Toss, a colourful little romp that came back to haunt him, and the saxophone solos that typically did not end until the police showed up. He advocated sidewalk chalk art because it washed away as soon as the rain came down. He allowed some marginal respect for Cezanne for letting his apples wither and rot before our eyes on the canvas, but beyond that he was contemptuous of anything that could be framed, confined in a book, or rendered into a product to be boxed, blurbed, sold, and made into a miniseries.

  “There is only one form of Canadian art,” he lectured, “only one poem, one painting. It takes place in winter, in the winter of our discontent when the pipes freeze and the toilet no longer flushes. Like all great art it takes place in Edmonton. It took five hundred years to write. In the first verse two police officers drive a Cree teenager into an alley and leave him there to freeze to death. In the second verse he does freeze to death. In the third verse, if there is a third verse, the officers are cleared of any wrongdoing, and given a promotion. There,” he said. “Voila. The point and counterpoint, the alpha and omega, the anvil of our art. Its heart. Our forge. The gorge in our godforsaken throat, and the God Almighty. Pretty writing,” he shouted, “is for the living dead and the international rich. Are you dead? Are you pretty? Are you the living dead? Are you a pawn of the international rich?” He turned to some impeccable sixteen-year-old girl and flummoxed her with the question. “Are you here to flute sentimental delicacies or to boom cannon fire?” Then with the ringing admonition “write, write if you must, but write with your fingers wreathed in fire,” he marched out the door to smoke a handful of contraband cigarettes.

  IN THE END Petronius, to the outrage of just about everyone, was guilty of nothing indictable. He got off without even a reprimand. The lone teenager thought to be the object of his lust was force-marched with her mother and father at her side to stand in front of a blazing battalion of cameras where she burst into tears and, to her parents’ mortification, insisted that Petronius Totem was the greatest Canadian author since Jane Austen. “I love Petro,” she sobbed. “We all love him.”

  7.0

  AN HONEST MISTAKE (THE FALL OF ME)

  OUT THE LEFT SIDE of the window Lake Superior stretched on for as long as it wanted. The sun shone, the radio squawked incoherently. On the right side the rock and the foliage didn’t say a word. A restaurant appeared and drifted by. I knew that restaurant from before: Elaine and I laughing, happy, the plates overhanging with whitefish. Elaine adored whitefish, battered, fried in butter, or barbecued in tinfoil. “If you’re Micmac from Shediac,” she told me, her eyes casting green deep thought in all directions, “Atlantic salmon is where you’re at. You hail from Thirty Thousand Islands then walleye’s your game. You belong to the Haida tribe you have your Pacific salmon. But if you’re like me, white trash from Ontario with a last name like Moffat, you live and die fresh whitefish.” Sex food, she called it. She thought the high levels of mercury had something to do with it.

  I watched the restaurant slip behind me. It appeared to have been hit by a bomb recently, or set on fire for insurance reasons, and was now a scattered mess of blackened flooring tiles, shingles and broken glass. All the benchmarks of my love had turned into charred ruins. Either they were already charred ruins or about to become charred ruins. The world was getting rationalized.

  Even my children.

  For a moment in the rear-view mirror I saw them, Maddy and Alex once again, in the back seat, snug as folded embryos, fast asleep as we hurtled the north shore. I looked again. No children in the back seat. No Elaine in the front. Kids, I thought, my kids …

  In the end having kids was not as bad as everyone says. It’s true that at two Madeline was hardly capable of reading a sentence, let alone writing one, but she came along nicely. When she was a babbling child I coaxed her to sleep on the aphorisms of Schopenhauer, Kafka, and the essays of Czesław Miłosz in translation. By the time she was three I had implanted her with the basic tenets of modernism. She evolved quickly into a tall girl with unnaturally large eyes and a taste for the manifestos of Marinetti and the plays of Max Frisch. Alex was two years older, quiet, troubled, and displayed an annoying tendency toward magic realism for which I forgave him.

  These little moments of literary affinity solidified my standing with my children during
the same time in which my relationship with their mother was heading south. I am not proud to say this. Although Elaine had forgiven me for my Vancouver expedition to rescue Pete Tidecaster, the bullet wounds had not healed entirely. This was not necessarily a bad thing. As I pointed out to Elaine, a woman does not shoot a man three times if she has no deep feelings for him. It had taken time but we had recovered, somehow. The wormhole of Elaine’s forgiveness had opened once again, a little puncture, an opening in the dense wall of her fury toward me, into which I dove, gratefully, and head first. But trouble was brewing.

  Like I said, I am not proud to say what happened next. It was an innocent mistake really, one that began with a video camera and a pair of youthful breasts and ended up with that prophetic yellow Post-it Note curling from the fridge door, the Post-it Note that was now stuffed into my wallet. I would like to point out that no end of mistakes have been committed over youthful breasts, and as a man I find it somewhat unfair that the youthful breasts get off without blame while the man does not, especially if the man is not as youthful as the breasts.

  The misunderstanding took place on a brilliant if toxic Saturday morning with the fumes of the Alberta tar swamps sweeping eastward across Canada. Now and then a pigeon or a songbird or a fried cyborg chicken dropped dead from the sky. The bells of a six-alarm fire riffled through the neighbourhood, prophetic perhaps, as I drove Maddy to her Saturday morning 10:45 ballet class, like I did every Saturday morning at 10:45. I drove the car I was driving now.

  On that day Elaine had tasked me with the assignment of taping Madeline’s ballet performance: a brief ten-minute run-though of plies, changements, arabesques, and other French-sounding dance moves that demand to be written in italics. This being the special performance day, the parents were allowed inside. Effectively disguised as Maddy’s father, I took my place on a neat row of threadbare chairs along with the other parents and together we unsheathed digital Japanese-made video cameras and took aim.