Searching for Petronius Totem

by Peter Unwin

  Similarly, when Eunice Atwill abandons her five children and her half-written novel to start a new life as a sex-trade worker in a Whitehorse massage parlour, the reader/driver could simply hang a right at Winnipeg, head up north on the Alaska Highway, and pull into a strip mall on the outskirts of Whitehorse where, depending on whether the police had shut the place down or not, a forty-dollar sexual encounter could be had on a chiropractor’s table above the pool hall at the corner of Sycamore and Wann.

  In a clever touch Petronius had printed text on both sides of each sign. This way the driver heading east from Tofino read the opening sentence on one side of the sign, while the westbound reader read the final sentence on the other. It was conceptually brilliant and it was an organizational disaster of the highest order. By the time it was over thousands of confused young and not-so-young people were wandering about the sides of the Trans-Canada Highway; one went missing for seven days and was found near Temiskaming in the summer cottage of a widely shunned ex–National Hockey League player. Another was mauled by a bear while attempting to relieve herself in the bush. Still, of the estimated nine thousand art volunteers who actually showed up at various locations across the country, only eleven were struck by a car or a truck, and only three of those seriously injured. Two others suffered concussions from falling bogus inukshuks.

  Beyond these minor complications Road Book/Book Road was conceptually as perfect as a book could get. It was a book that didn’t need a publisher or blurbs, or hacks, or flacks, or book clubs, or even Facebook, or Goodreads or Shitty Reads, or any reads at all. The reader was forced to get off the couch and physically move to enter into its pages. It was a book that involved the excited milling of strangers waving placards: people marching along roads and dashing into the forest to have sex. It required shitting and pissing in the woods. It involved getting bitten by blackflies, mayflies, horseflies, deer flies, shadflies, and even dog flies, and it involved the journey of thousands of miles. To read this book meant immersing yourself in a forest of symbols, of broken, passing images glimpsed out of the corner of the eye while travelling at high speed. To fathom this book you had to plunge headfirst into the country and to finish it you had to cross a continent, inhaling the smell of fish and gasoline, pine forest and wolf willow. It was a book whose audience was guaranteed. On the first day seven hundred thousand innocent people read at least a sentence or phrase from Road Book/Book Road, making Petronius, in his words, the greatest non-selling author of all time.

  Unfortunately Road Book/Book Road was unleashed on a weekend that coincided with the worst heat wave to strike North America since the 1936 dustbowl. By seven in the morning it was 112 Fahrenheit in Pierre, South Dakota, and by noon the heat wave had crossed the border and was pushing 110 in Brandon, Manitoba, where the pavement of the Trans-Canada began to rise in horizontal air phantoms and drift off into the ether.

  Despite that, day one of Road Book/Book Road was not an unqualified failure. Nearly ten thousand Canadians stepped off buses, arrived on bicycles, or managed to get themselves to thirty-two different drop-off locations across the country to take part in the largest Fluxus-style art Happening ever.

  On arrival at each location they received a bottle of water, a box of condoms, and a sign hand-painted front and back with a phrase from Road Book/Book Road. It is true that pages four through nine of Chapter One were inadvertently shipped to Revelstoke, British Columbia, where they jarringly completed an already complex and confusing section of the second-to-last chapter. These impromptu juxtapositions were part of the aesthetic challenge of the project, the lies, said Petro, from which truth is cobbled. So were moments when the sign carrier inadvertently turned around, and projected the wrong sentence at the oncoming traffic.

  The first half of the first day was marked by a congenial swelling of young people as they attempted to space themselves across the country. Unsuspecting drivers encountered a bronze-coloured young man with a bandana tied around his forehead, stripped to his boxer shorts and waving a large white placard that read:

  … surfacing like beautiful losers from the depths

  of her two solitudes,

  Eunice Atwill inserted the last spike

  into her alabaster arm and looked forward to what …

  Zipping by at 100 kph, the driver had just enough time to puzzle that enigmatic sign, when the next appeared:

  … she increasingly thought of as her Klondike Days …

  ON THAT FIRST magical day the novelty and the epic magnitude of Road Book/Book Road gathered enough curiosity and goodwill to survive official scrutiny. Reporters wrote of eager, fresh-faced Canadian youths, many of them away from home for the first time, proudly waving the flags of literature, or what they preferred to call “literacy,” although how we got from literature to literacy has never been made clear to me. They gushed over youth-caucus Conservatives from Yorkton, Saskatchewan, who sat down to share bottled water with death-rock devotees from Nepean, Ontario. In a fit of optimism the Thunder Bay Herald Chronicle Journal Reporter announced, “Canadian youth on wild walk for literacy.” It seemed that Petronius Totem was on the verge of being forgiven. In the newsroom of the Peterborough Examiner a veteran and grizzled editor came up with his legendary clunker, “Thousands in Heat for Art.” Petronius was delighted. “Those guys,” he said to me, “will never die,” and he set about immediately to print the headline on a hundred collector’s item T-shirts.

  By three o’clock in the afternoon the tide had changed. Remote understaffed hospitals from Chapleau, Rainy River, and Sault Ste. Marie had already dispatched their only ambulance to pick up dehydrated college kids who had been burnt the colour of rhubarb. What had begun as the joyous congeniality of young people spilling out of buses, sharing addresses, and joining together in a nationwide display of friendship and dope-smoking, by the end of day one had degenerated into a full-scale first-degree old-fashioned Fluxus gone horribly wrong, a Happening of the kind that the world had never seen before, and emphatically did not want to see Happen again.

  Petronius had made not the slightest calculation for the sheer number of oddballs, misfits, pathological attention-seekers, and New Age nutbars who would show up for an assignment such as this.

  Some stripped naked and began a day-long imitation of Isadora Duncan. Four diehards from Penticton set up a working ten-foot-tall hash pipe in front of the Terry Fox Memorial and covered Petronius’s placard with the freshly painted plea: End the Suffering; Legalize Pot Now! Some climbed into trees and refused to get out. Others fell in love and refused to get out of that, too. Some were not students at all, but grifters and con men, novelists, divorcees, people who were not young and felt sheepish about it. Some had run away from home, escaped from jail, or were, for some reason, attempting to find or lose themselves. Some were suicidal. Others, who had every reason to be suicidal, were not. A few professional types with beards banged on the bottom of overturned spring water drums and demanded that the US get out of everywhere, including the US. Others lugged two-fours of rapidly warming beer on their heads and climbed to the top of rock cuts where they got roaring drunk, and constructed wobbly inukshuks that immediately toppled on to the Trans-Canada Highway and caused cars and trucks to swerve into the ditch. Remarkably no one was killed, although an eighty-eight-year old woman had to be pried by the jaws of life from the back seat of a car and airlifted to a Sudbury hospital. The cost of Road Book/Book Road was mounting.

  By five o’clock in the afternoon, four provincial police departments, the Mounties, and a cadre of student paramedics were dashing across the country hauling off weeping schizoaffectives, dehydrated fine arts majors, and blind drunk rednecks who thought that Road Book/Book Road was a great chance to drink too much and get laid. Frustrated panty-raiders from Queen’s University, lugging a “Nuke the Whales” banner across the highway, attempted to snare a westbound eighteen-wheel rig and found themselves hurled one hundred and twenty feet down the highway. They had to be bussed to a hospital in Thunder
Bay. Devious investment fund punks from McGill carried a sign that said cryptically, “Petronius Totem is not a baller.”

  By dinnertime complete chapters of Road Book/Book Road had turned around and were heading either east or west onto the home turf of someone else’s chapter. Thus fifty kilometres of Eunice Atwill III, selflessly guiding the entire male population of Fort McMurray into what she thought of as “the new Alberta tar sand, filled with the liquid softness of hard men,” was infiltrated by subordinate clauses from an adjoining chapter in which a sperm whale, debilitated with heavy metals and wounded by the propeller of the Greenpeace vessel Seahawk II, managed to drag itself up onto a rocky beach of the Cabot Trail where, according to a sign held up in the parking lot of Mary’s Grocery and Dew Worm stand outside of Terrace Bay, Ontario, the wounded whale of the previous sign then

  … exploded in her skillful hand, sending its yearning pent-up viscosity leaping across a stack of four-year-old Chatelaine magazines …

  The real action, as far as Petro was concerned, was to take place beyond the textual narrative: the “off-road” story. Young women meant for marriage to eligible neurosurgeons ending up in the sleeping bags of twenty-year-old poetry pimps from Sackville, Nova Scotia, smoking dope, quoting Picabia, climaxing ecstatically in the woods as the hushing shoreline of the Trans-Canada Highway pulsed against their passion and the mosquitoes roared.

  Petronius looked on from command central: a borrowed, battered white van, from which it was my job to aim a video camera at the passing spectacle. We gazed on fallen signs, on a disarray within the heart of a nation, on police cruisers racing the shoulders of the highway, sirens blaring. At one point beyond Blind River Petro glanced up to the sky and saw the CH-149 Cormorant search-and-rescue helicopter that followed him like a guilty conscience.

  “We’re getting there,” he shouted. “We’re getting there.”

  WHERE WE GOT exactly was the parking lot of Gus McKenney’s Jumbo Hot Dog and Dew Worm stand west of the Ontario border. There on that gravel parking lot beneath a big sky, four large women with short cropped hair stripped down to their Kodiak boots and marched hand in hand westbound on the paved surface of the Trans-Canada Highway, singing a Fred Eaglesmith song. It was there that Road Book/Book Road assumed official status as a national emergency. A zealous undercover Mountie planted in the crowd took the women for insurgents of some kind, or lesbians, and got in touch with his handlers who immediately contacted the Department of National Defence. An emergency meeting was convened in an office tower high above the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, and shortly after that four fully loaded armoured personnel carriers and a single tank were dispatched from the Armed Forces Base at Shilo, and proceeded eastbound on the Trans-Canada in what was dubbed “a counter-insurgency operation.”

  The operation did not go well. A fidgety twenty-four-year-old corporal with the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery peered through the optical slits of his tank and to his terror saw four hefty, buck-naked Toronto lesbians holding hands and singing. Despite two tours of duty in Afghanistan, the corporal panicked and at three hundred metres fired off a 70 mm armour-piercing shell that took out a billboard for Leggit’s Bundled Dinner Packages and travelled another half mile before blowing to smithereens the World’s Largest Coca-Cola Can, leaving behind the jagged, smoking stump of the beloved roadside attraction. Finally it lodged itself, spent, in the bathroom of a Shell station on the south side of the highway next to the sand pit.

  The free ride for Road Book/Book Road was over. By midnight two hundred army emergency tents had been erected on the prairies, and crusty editors picked blisters off their fingers and began banging away at their keyboards. They’d had enough of art, conceptual or otherwise. The world was going to pieces, and they were out to retrieve the glorious heyday when the news was not in the hands of eighteen-year-old Internet whiz kids who had never read a newspaper and had no intention of doing so. They would retrieve that glorious heyday when smoking was good for you, bras were pointed, and the Leafs went deep into the playoffs.

  “Hellish Ride for Road Book Volunteers …”

  It infuriated them all over again that a nymphet-crazed drug addict with a drinking problem had done what they had always wanted to do and had never gotten around to: write a book of some sort and become at least momentarily famous. Their envy spewed forth in a barrage of eighty-point Bold Bodoni:

  “Jihadists Infiltrate Canadian Art ‘Happening’ …”

  “Obscenity charges pending …”

  “Public foots bill for Totem’s art trash …”

  Smirking men in makeup stood in front of cameras and sounded stern. To them art was something that nasally-sounding people talked about at taxpayers’ expense on CBC Radio between eleven and noon on Saturday mornings, and that was more than enough, thank you. They had little tolerance for throngs of tattooed young people streaming across the crowded Canadian road, reading books about continental philosophy on electronic platforms these journalists didn’t know existed, plugged into music the kids had made themselves, taking drugs they’d never heard of, and engaging in sexual practices that they considered physically impossible.

  For the most part they harboured not a single fuzzy feeling toward Petronius Totem and the arts. He had deliberately and methodically incurred the anger of a growing number of influential people who had used a conspicuous lack of talent to help them assume powerful positions. They did not appreciate that a man they had drooled over for writing Ten Thousand Busted Chunks (“a staggering life-altering book that maps the lyric potentiality of even the grimmest life”) would follow up with an untitled anti-novel and that this book would be printed using an environmentally-friendly soybean-based ink intended to disappear from the page within nine months.

  Road Book/Book Road was mocked, scorned, denounced, psychoanalyzed, threatened, bullied, blasted, dismissed, policed, and foamed over. In an indignant letter to the editor of the Toronto Star, a woman who had previously thrown her underwear at Petro during a guerilla poetry reading on a Toronto streetcar now demanded her underwear back. Good luck, I thought.

  In the aftermath of all this Petronius lay low. He was planning his last public performance.

  9.1

  BY THE SHORES OF GITCHE GUMEE

  THE FINAL ACT in the fall of Petronius Totem took place on a bright May Two-Four weekend outside of a dilapidated fish and chip shop on the wharf at Rossport, Ontario. It was there that Petro, with my help, attempted to become the first man in history to circumnavigate Lake Superior in a rubber inner tube.

  I had taken all the necessary precautions. First, I secured the vessel, a standard beach-variety inner tube purchased with Canadian Tire money from a Canadian Tire store in Sault Ste. Marie. She was a good tube, and seaworthy, and we christened her The Ship of State Has Sunk, painting her name in nautical white lacquer on the bow. Duct-taped to the deck was a polystyrene container filled with two dozen Canadian dew worms. It was Petro’s intention to complete the world’s first solo–inner tube circumnavigation of Lake Superior living only on fish that he caught with rod and reel. The fish he planned to wash down with three forty-ounce bottles of Highwoods ten-year-old Canadian rye. For backup he packed in six cans of tuna, and two mickeys of Bell’s scotch. The whiskey he hooked up to a broomstick taped to the inner tube and ran some plastic tubing so he could suck at will. The pole stood in loosely for a mizzen-mast and the entire contraption resembled a post-apocalyptic hospital gurney jerry-rigged for sea travel. For reading he brought along twenty-six novels by Georges Simenon wrapped in plastic and floated with the help of three large party balloons, towing them behind him on a twenty-foot nylon rope. He had also lashed a rather ornately carved hookah to the tube with nylon rope, along with a specially designed book-holder that permitted hand-free reading in winds up to forty kilometres per hour.

  The event was a planned impossibility from the start. I didn’t seriously expect Petro to circumnavigate a lake the size of Portugal in a five-dollar inner tube. Even with glo
bal warming I did not expect his body to withstand the summer temperature of Lake Superior, which is that of a refrigerator. And that was at the height of summer. I just didn’t care very much. Neither did he. Elaine, for her part, had already dismissed the undertaking as “pathetic performative masculinity.” She had agreed to accompany me only because Alex was in computer camp and she wanted Maddy out of the city for a few days, and because she could never turn up an opportunity to feast on fresh whitefish. She was convinced Petro would not survive the voyage. I think, in fact, she may have been looking forward to it. To help ensure Petro’s survival, I’d purchased a wetsuit for ten dollars from a Sault Ste. Marie yard sale, although I now suspected that what he really needed was a dry suit. I had done my research, at least some of it, but I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was a wetsuit or a dry suit that was needed in extremely cold water. I had also gone over with Petronius the sickening swells that could come of out nowhere and heave him up and down like a yo-yo, the ten-foot waves, the twenty-foot, even the three-storey waves that would lift him into the sky and drop him along with ten thousand tons of water on the deck of a downbound freighter. To say the least, I explained to him, a wave like that is going to snuff out your hookah. He would not be striking matches in a wave like that. I even stuck my nose in a few foxed nautical manuals and from the bottle float studies in particular, I knew, or I thought I knew, that Lake Superior flowed in a clockwise direction, although I suspected I might have got it wrong, and maybe in fact the lake flowed the other way. Either way, I plotted Petronius’s course as carefully as I could given the dimensions of the lake. My nautical estimations suggested that by the second day he would float almost to Thunder Bay, or to the Sibley Peninsula where he intended to crash the Sleeping Giant Literary Festival to which he had not been invited. In fact, a police restraining order had been granted prohibiting Petronius from getting within fifty metres of the festival’s director, a practitioner of what Petro called Fluff School Poetics (FSP) who was fond of agonizing in public about something she piously called her “creative process,” and who had publicly accused Petro of stealing her artistic property, her sexual property, her dog, and her nineteen-year-old daughter.