Searching for Petronius Totem

by Peter Unwin

  10.0

  GOD’S HOTTIE

  I LET UP ON THE GAS. The Pukaskwa River was behind me. Joe Pukaskwa, that old marrow sucker, had faded into the rock. But he was still here someplace between the steep rock and the cold water. He was out there with Petro, buried in that forest of symbols, and both of them were inside me, the old wife-eating marrow sucker, and the chunk-busting conceptual artist. And then there was me. Something bad was on the verge of happening to me. Very bad and very soon.

  The highway remained empty for several kilometres. At that point an eighteen-wheel Leggit Industries transport passed me on a hill with its horn blaring. Another prisoner van transporting fresh criminals to Leggit work farms in the Okanagan. The truck veered uncomfortably close when it passed; a grisly hand studded with gaudy sapphire and ruby rings came out on the driver’s side and gave me the finger. As I was getting the finger, an antenna on the cab of the vehicle turned in my direction and blinked a sequence of red signals, and then the truck accelerated and rocketed around the mountain cut and out of sight.

  “Fuck you,” I said, and gave the finger back.

  A moment later I saw her. The ghost-walking beauty of the north shore. The woman.

  She stood a hundred metres in front, full-blown and impossibly beautiful, a vision constructed in the classical mould, wearing a size twelve grey and silver bikini. The Vision stepped through the fog with the studied arrogant motions of a runway model, strutting the Trans-Canada Highway. A crescent of dark hair gave way to smooth bare shoulders, which gave way to breasts folded in triangles of checkered fabric. From throat to toe this was a good-looking ghost. This was a neo-cubist vision of flesh. A historically significant display of thighs and arms and ankles, toes, lobes, knees, ears, nose, and throat. She moved doe-gentle down the middle of the Trans-Canada Highway, draped in fog. I looked to the sky for a helicopter hovering; I looked frantically for one of those parked trucks that indicate another movie is being made starring one of those enormously famous people that we keep hearing about. I looked for anything to indicate she was human, and had been lowered on a wire and was part of a photo shoot for a Revlon commercial. But nothing. She was a stand-alone.

  “Oh God Almighty,” I cried out, and by this I did not mean that increasingly popular and generic New Age stand-in for a multitude of soft-core deities; I meant God as in God Almighty, that hard-core big angry bearded Old Testament white guy who looks like your father on a bad day after he’s been drinking and who is forever sticking his furious gob through the clouds and annihilating the human race. That guy.

  “Oh God,” I moaned. “Forgive me.” I knew this ghostly apparition parading in front of me posed an existential threat to the already threatened foundation of my love for Elaine. I tried to confront head-on the two celestial dimples that burrowed in the small of her back. I could not see them, not yet, but I knew from experience that they were there. I had confronted such dimples before, if not always successfully, and now I confronted the glowing prism of golden sunlight that shone in the fine hairs on her arms (even though it was overcast, and foggy) and I felt my marriage inch deeper into the shitter of regret and covetousness from whence no marriage returns or if it does, it returns furtively, and diminished. In a matter of seconds my love and desire for Elaine were getting sucked out of me from the inside by a ghost-walking stunner who trod the Trans-Canada in a size twelve Aguaclara two-piece and swung her hips like a pony. My Elaine was in danger of getting eclipsed by a higher level of beauty, a Kingdom of God hottie subjected to one of those bikini waxes that only the Master of the Universe Himself could administer. Here on the shores of Gitche Gumee between Dead Horse Creek and the Pukaskwa River, this roadside ghost-walking stunner was on the verge of wiping out the erotic hard drive on which my cherished memories of Elaine were stored. My hard drive was about to crash. Elaine would disintegrate jpeg by jpeg into the trash bin while a new beauty threatened to become the screensaver of my love.

  I tried to call out but I was speechless. I could barely croak. Language had not been invented beyond grunts of wild boars and catcalls of protozoa and the first poets. The looming granite walls, four billion years old, if a day, groaned and began to agitate and palpitate like a mass of teenage flesh, like my flesh. Her hips moved and the walls of rock convulsed and opened. Out of the crevices I glimpsed the little elves of ancient lore, dashing about with beards and erections that pointed permanently north. She walked on and their mouths formed the first words to emerge from the prehistoric mouth of Man or at least men in general:

  “Take off your clothes, lady! Please! Pretty please!”

  She walked on elegant feet and I knew from experience that attached to those feet were toes, ten in number, and adorning those toes would be toenails; there might be nail polish on the nails. Celestial varnishes, scarlet dyes from Persia, and neon purple from Value Village.

  God save me.

  She was behind me now, in the rear-view mirror. She began to evaporate from the toes up into the fog that lifted from the grey surface of the road. In her wake she left the unpleasant possibility that on the shores of Gitche Gumee a woman existed who was fairer and more beautiful than the one I was with, or would be with if she had not tossed me out of her house in a fury. My Elaine was dying on the tarmac. Elaine Moffat was about to become the roadkill of love. I saw myself returned to the bad old days of writing pornographic emails to women I’d never met, and getting stalked by their rifle-toting husbands whom I’d never met either. Once again I would doom myself to years of sweaty but empty coupling with blondes who worked out at the gym alright, but had never read a page of Elias Canetti.

  Against my better judgment I took another look in the rear-view mirror and saw the hips of God’s hottie swing to the left, to the right, and then to the left again. It’s that second swing to the left that kills a man. I knew that, you know that. Her dimples winked. The shimmering silver-grey fabric of her bikini bottom inched north. A bolt of hair swung the length of her shoulders. She turned to look back, an insolent look and then …

  Then the car hit me.

  At the last moment I saw it, one of those family vehicles that resemble armoured personnel carriers with the roof stacked high with camping gear, tarped and corded down, a corner of the tarp flapping in the slipstream. A Baby on Board sticker can usually be found on the back windshield even though that baby is now fourteen years old and seeing a psychologist. In the front behind the wheel was a man of no apparent shape or purpose. For a moment he looked more like an inflatable doll than a human being. A series of pens protruded from his shirt pocket, and for some reason I was struck by the notion that he was in the patio furniture line. His wife sat in the passenger seat, both of them talking furiously into small phones. It was clear to me that they were talking to each other, and that they were engaged in a domestic dispute of such ferocity that it demanded a high-tech firewall between them. Crammed into the back of the vehicle were the children, a dog, and elaborate water toys, still inflated. All of the passengers, including the dog, stared intently at a video game on a screen mounted on the ceiling.

  It did not escape my notice that the colour of the vehicle matched the shade of silver-grey bikini bottom that one moment earlier had been threatening to bring me and Elaine to an end. I found this strangely comforting, and more than a little suspicious. As my car spun a wild pirouette down the westbound lane of the Trans-Canada everything made sense; I felt a stab of patriotic pride in the knowledge that I was about to become a flattened pancake of flesh on a rock cut of the Canadian Shield. Flowers would be placed here, plastic flowers, true, but at least it was something.

  The rock wall reared in front of me in stop time. The microseconds ticked; I read with some pleasure the graffiti that had been spray-painted on the rock. “This road trip sucks” was followed by “Dave loves Jenna always,” circled in a hand-painted wobbly purple heart, and finally by the strident and slightly cryptic “Free Newfoundland Now!” I went into the rock, a glancing blow on the passe
nger side that produced a deafening chalk-on-chalkboard sound and a river of gold sparks cascading backwards.

  I was airborne.

  “Yippee,” I cried, remembering with a gush of joy that yippee was the first comprehensible word uttered by little Madeline on a day years ago in the park when she was trying out the swing for the first time. I had pushed her with more fatherly enthusiasm than was required and she had lost her grip and sailed like a well-thrown football over the heads of the startled Philippine women, across the sky, and into the branches of a newly planted Norwegian maple tree. “Yippee,” she cried. Her first word!

  Beneath me the silver-grey vehicle continued east. Hubby and wife hurled their pain and fury at each other on their cellphones. The kiddies and dog remained intent on Constant Brutal Death. As for me, I pitched through the sky above the trees like one of those sideways figures in a Chagall painting. The four-billion-year-old rock of the Canadian Shield came up to implant itself into my brains.

  “Yippee!” I cried as the car ricocheted to the other side of the road and leapt the rails. “Yippee.”

  11.0

  THE SWAN SONG

  WHEN I CAME TO, or nearly came to, it was pitch black out and I assumed that I was dead and that death consisted of performing endlessly in the Black Swan on the Danforth in the east end of Toronto on a Friday night. The distinction can be a fine one, I agree, but I concluded I was almost certainly not dead, at least not completely dead. If I was dead how was it that Petronius was on stage beside me acting out his last show. I had the feeling he knew it was his last show. Beside Petro stood the sleepy-faced guitar player from Brantford, Ontario. “Hello Wally,” I said. “It’s been a while.” He didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at me. I was dead to him. His name was Reggie but for some reason he had always asked us to call him Wally. A living maternal descendent of the Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant and therefore officially royalty, and recognized as such by the British monarchy and the British government, he had the grace not to lord it over us. For a day job he ran a smoke shack off Highway 2.

  There we were together again, like in the old days, Petronius Totem and the Mothers of Confederation. There I was once again playing a four-piece graphite Shakespeare fly-fishing rod, curled at the end, held in place by four bass guitar strings, and connected to a pickup and amp. “You don’t know how to fish,” Petronius had said to me once (it seemed to pain him to say this), “and you don’t know how to play bass. So here.” He had presented me with the modified fishing rod that someone he once knew in prison had built while serving five to ten. “You are now the fishing musician,” he said.

  The Black Swan, as it always did, stank of half-century-old used nicotine and only with effort was it possible to un-stick my feet from the gluey beer stains on the stage. Great bluesmen had once stood here, sticking to this very stage. All of them had done the Wang Dang Doodle all night long and convalesced in the St. James Infirmary and now were dead and gone, their bodies buried down by the highway sign. Some of their faces looked down on me from faded framed photographs on the wall. Hello boys. Me next.

  The soles of my sneakers threatened to tear away every time I took a step. I began by plucking a string on my bass guitar–fishing rod. The string broke; Wally rolled his eyes. He had come down in the world from a time when he was lead guitarist for several suicide-prone rockabilly legends, and sometimes he let us know it.

  Petronius stepped to the front and started:

  “Just because I’m a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, that doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily a brutal killer, right? I mean, I don’t have to be, right? That’s different, I mean, from being on a Death Squad, right?” He struck a plaintive note of reasonableness here.

  “Fuck off,” someone yelled. “Get a job.”

  Petro smiled. He snapped his fingers twice, a signal for the band to change tempo, which we did, or at least Wally did, since he knew about technical matters like changing tempo. He began to strum an upbeat ditty straight out of the Ottawa Valley.

  “Yeehaw,” cried Petro and took to stomping his foot like an old-time fiddler.

  “We call ourselves the Mounties

  We’re a national embarrassment

  We do the sexual harassment

  We put the dildo on your desk

  We put our paws upon your breast

  Well you can guess the rest …”

  It had been a bad year for the Mounties. The world was watching a YouTube video of some poor chap wiggling like bacon in a pan as four Mounties cheerfully tasered him to death. Even after he was dead. The Mounties had gone viral. Like a virus. Then there was the whole women thing. Despite this, Petro’s little ditty was not going over with the enthusiasm you might have expected.

  “Fuck off, homo.”

  “Go suck Taliban cock, asshole.”

  Petro, cheered by the enthusiasm at least, lifted his arms into the air and tried to get a patriotic little singalong going.

  “They call themselves the Mounties,

  They’ll shoot you in the face

  They’ll come to town and rape your wife

  like they did in Watson Lake.”

  Petro raised his hairy fist into the air. “Come on everybody, sing!”

  No one, it seemed, was in a singing mood that night and instead of singing along, a bloated beefcake with a Frankenstein scar running across his forehead, and an Elvis Presley T-shirt on his chest, rose to his feet and tumbled toward the stage in an attempt to break Petro’s neck.

  Because of my advanced martial arts training it has always fallen to me in these moments to take care of the situation. Not for the first time in my career I was resentful of this responsibility. By default I had become the unpaid security muscle for the progressive branch of the Canadian literary scene, and I did not appreciate it. I unstuck my left foot from the goo that made up the stage floor of the Black Swan, and taking care to turn my hips over and get full extension on the blow, I delivered a solid side kick square into the great belly of the Philistine. The Philistine folded up like a jackknife and lay on the stage in front of Petro who smiled down at him. “Have some free verse, buddy, it’s free. Get it? Free. What’s not to like about free?” He drove his boot square into the Philistine’s belly, at which point his wife, or his girlfriend or his mother, shouted beerily from a nearby table, “Do it again!” And Petro did do it again, but only once and the fellow lay on the floor for the rest of the number.

  It looked to be another one of those nights in the big city when everyone was too busy updating their Facebook profiles to come out and watch Petronius Totem and the Mothers of Confederation redefine the parameters of the Canadian spoken word. Once again we droned on to the same dozen souls who each night made it a habit to frequent the shows of the ten thousand bands that make up the Toronto music scene. I was struck by the demoralizing possibility that these dozen people, not all of whom had their teeth, were the same dozen people who bought old-fashioned books made out of paper; the same dozen who habitually gathered around fatal car accidents for reasons that are obscure to me, and who, once the body has been taken away by the medics and sand thrown down on the gore, climbed the stairs of the nearest bar and sat down in ghostly silence to cast their eyes on the band.

  There they sat in front of me. A blind man, nattily dressed, with a dog that was also blind, was eating potato chips and nodding. He was our biggest fan. Our only fan really. Him and his dog both. Three young people crowded around a cellphone, laughing. They were in the wrong club, and were waiting for a cab to come and get them out of there. A female alcoholic of limp grandeur got up and dramatically went around to everyone in the room, tearfully hugged them, smothered them with kisses, said a tragic goodbye, then sat down again and ordered another double rum and Coke. According to the bartender this routine had been going on every night for seventeen years. The crowd was rounded out by an elderly man who had set type for Josef Skvorecky’s The Bass Saxophone, and for some reason was a serious fan of Petronius To
tem.

  Petro finished up his “Ballad of the Mounties” to the sound of one hand clapping, and launched straight into a monologue that neither I nor Wally had heard before, or rehearsed.

  “Now ladies and gentleman,” he crooned in his trademark malt whiskey voice, “it may surprise you to know it but I’m a very uptight person by nature and I lie awake at night thinking about all the terrible things that are happening in the world …” No one in fact seemed surprised by this, or interested, but Petro did not falter. “I think about Free Trade,” he resumed, “the Ebola virus and global finance and the melting of the polar icecaps, about AIDS and Goldman Sachs, I think about the theatre of the spectacle and the Royal Bank and that god-awful fried chicken that is flying around in the sky. And believe me there’s more to that stuff than the church and the government want you to know. I think about the ascendancy of the image and the me-first self-consciousness of what passes for art and I start to imagine a world where our children no longer read the collected works of Ernesto Sabato, or even the uncollected works of Ernesto Sabato, and I start to get worried. I begin to wonder what’s the very worst thing that could happen to us. I do, ladies and gentlemen, believe me, I do. I lie there at night giving it my undivided attention and that’s when it occurs to me that the worst thing that could ever happen in this world is not the human genome project, or online dating … No, even worse than that, is no sex.