by Peter Unwin
“Now by no sex I do not mean bad sex, because like my friend Roy once said to me, any sex at all is good sex. It’s true that Roy died of autoerotic asphyxiation, and it was not pretty, but what he said made a lot of sense. And that’s when it comes to me that the worst thing in the world is having no sex. It’s a hex. Think about it: there’s you, maybe there’s some Tex-Mex playing on the radio, Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex on late-night TV, and in between the Tex-Mex and Eddy Rex and the lack of sex an hour goes by and you’re thinking what next? Now that hour turns into two hours, then three. Soon half a day goes by with no sex, and you’re thinking, ‘My God, for the last six hours I’ve had no sex.’ Ladies and gentlemen, think about it.”
At this point the audience could have nicely obliged the band by joining in with a boisterous chorus of “No sex!” but there was no boisterous chorus of “No sex,” just an awkward silence, and a predictable and ghostly drunk from the dark recesses of the room who muttered, “Fuhhk-aawwf!” Someone pays these guys to do this.
“Exactly,” said Petro. “So then I start thinking about what’s the second worst thing in the world, what’s almost but not quite as bad as no sex. And as I lie there trying to solve that ancient riddle a police siren breaks through the night and it hits me. Bad cops. I mean, there you are, that night of hell that your mother warned you about has just passed and you get up and turn on the television and what you get is two veteran cops with their wraparound fascist drug-cartel sunglasses have just hauled some poor native kid to the outskirts of the city and beat the crap out of him? And now those cops are suing the government for a million dollars because that kid’s face injured their knuckles while they were beating him to death. It turns out that one of those cops is a pianist, he’s a regular Glenn Gould of corrupt police officers, and now his future is in doubt, all because of that Swampy Cree Indian with the overly hard face …”
No one was paying the slightest bit of attention. In fact, with the spots burning directly down on us, it was not possible to tell whether anyone was still in the place or not.
Petro looked to the back of the room, his face fatigued by too much age, too much art, too much smoke, and by the understanding that none of his staggering pronouncements had ever been heard properly. Or if they had been heard, they’d been sucked right up and regurgitated as celebrity discourse. He had been reduced to discourse, and the worst kind at that, celebrity discourse. All he’d got for his efforts had been the tacky lip service for Ten Thousand Busted Chunks. We’re dead, I thought. Dead as art. You’re dead. I’m dead. I had a vague sense that I’d been annihilated in a ridiculous bikini accident on the Trans-Canada. Like Albert Camus, I was roadkill. This is your last public performance, Petro. This is as good as it gets. After this, the chicken will hit the fan; we will not see each other again.
Petro dug wearily into his pocket and pulled out a page of newspaper that he held up in front of the audience, assuming there was one out there.
“What about this? Anyone have any problem with this?” With some difficulty he unfolded the sheet and read out the headline. “‘Top Toronto Cops Gambling with Organized Crime Boss.’ Now maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I don’t think that’s right. Do you? I mean, what sort of cards are they playing? Go Fish? Bridge? Crazy Eights? I don’t think so. And what do you think they’re talking about? Do you think they’re talking about the denial of urban reality in late twentieth-century Canadian literature? I don’t think so. I don’t think those cops have the slightest interest in the denial of urban reality in late twentieth-century Canadian literature. I think what they’re talking about his how they can shake down Vietnamese shopkeepers by planting cocaine in their stores. That’s what it says here.” Petro rattled the sheet. “That’s not what I call poetic justice. Maybe it’s un-Canadian of me, but I think it’s wrong for police officers to shoot unarmed innocent people in the face. Even if they are Stoney Point Indians. Those are bad cops and they’re getting away with murder. I mean, no sex is bad enough, and now bad cops. No sex, bad cops. I’m sick of it. Do you hear me. Sick of it!”
At this point Wally went into a staccato strumming thing on the guitar and I followed, or tried to follow, on the fishing pole. The drunken Philistine on the stage floor staggered to his knees and crawled off.
The fire escape door at the Black Swan had been wisely wedged open to let some sweet night air in and during Wally’s solo Petro went to it and stepped outside. I watched Wally sweep his elegant fingers through a cascade of rapid-fire notes. Petro stood on the stairs, fumbling for his pearl-handled lighter and firing up a reefer. He would stay out there until Wally’s solo was over, then rejoin us with a barrage of invective and poetic agitprop that would be only marginally soothed by his intake of cannabis. It was part of the act; we had done it before.
Petronius stood on the fire escape gazing out at the city, inhaling it, savouring the great urban sensorium for the last time. The Danforth glittered in the west, the jewels of the street lamps, the mesmerizing pinpricks of white, the softer amber of lit rooms where people in their millions lived and died and stroked their cats and listened to jazz on the radio and channel-surfed into the evening.
The sky showed turquoise though the sun was down. Beneath the rusted iron platform where Petro stood rushed the traffic of bicycle couriers and bearded incoherent men pushing shopping carts. On garage doors the tags and spray-paint graffiti of exuberant teenagers offered to kill someone or break their legs for a reasonable price.
Petro turned to me and nodded. It was a bare, self-conscious nod, as if a profound or obvious nod was not warranted between us, or was not possible between men who knew each other well. The age of the nod was over. It was not the nineties anymore. He was fond of saying that. Pete was long gone and now Petro was saying goodbye. I was just a small part of what he was saying goodbye to. He was sneaking out of the theatre of himself. The show was cancelled. He was no longer Petronious Totem the Ectoplasmic Iconoclastic Irreverentialist Existential Spasmodic. He was just another guy without a job or prospects. Another tired artist-guy on the fire escape with the usual bag of man-guilt hanging around his neck, trying to make his life go away behind a veil of smoke, knowing it would not go away, at least not for a while, knowing that all of his big breaks in life, all his artistic breakthroughs and stunning women and eureka moments, were behind him now, and he had squandered them, and that for all of the gin joints and hashish houses of Canada where he had undertaken his unacknowledged legislating of the world, he was going to die in a grubby poet’s room, like Modigliani with his sardines, like Milton Acorn with his dentures, an untouched computer-made chicken salad sandwich that was protected by copyright sitting on the table. This was where his journey had taken him, the life of Petronius Totem, to stand outside of a sticky beer joint in the east end, looking down on the city like a second-storey God.
He turned to look at me and nodded. He gave me the nod. He flicked the smouldering butt over the side, swivelled purposefully down the black metal staircase and was gone for good.
“Put the Coffee On”
12.0
RESURRECTION AU NATUREL
THEN, FINALLY, GROGGILY, I came to. I was conscious. It was barely light yet. Of all things I was in Elaine’s car. A great deal of it was intact, although radically foreshortened. The front end of the vehicle, including a great deal of the engine, was gone; the guts and gaskets and the bumper hung up in the trees with the mountain ash berries and a pair of mated crows.
It had been years since the last time I came to in a wrecked vehicle and the experience was not any more pleasant this time than it was then. The deafening wash of Superior fell into my ears, like radio static, ceaseless, without beginning or sense. Then came the birdsong, the pre-dawn birdsong, also without sense, at least to me since I am not a bird. The crows and ravens, the thrush, the wrens all squawking away like mad in some laughable attempt at language. On top of that the crickets were stridulating like crazy. Even a bobcat whistled from the branches, the cr
azy whistle of an oversized cat that has gone crazy for its mate. Every one of them, I realized suddenly, was squawking or stridulating for love, for one last desperate shot of love.
Steam rose from the fens, the ferns, the fallows, and whatever else one finds in the forest. It even rose from the piles of wrecked automotive debris that lay scattered around the trees and the dark spongy floor of the jungle. The twang of Wally’s guitar still hung in my ear. Petro was disappearing down a Toronto fire escape, but I was not dead. The fire had not yet consumed me. It’s true I was pinned inside a car that had come down a rock escarpment and crashed its way through the trees and the boulders. But I was alive. I recognized a good many of the symptoms from before: the pain in my groin, my extremities, my head. Yes, I was alive. I could conjugate verbs, I could recite a bit of Brodsky’s poems in English if need be, I could bleed, even profusely if I had to.
The door on the passenger side had collapsed inward and the interior handle had broken loose and impaled itself deep into my right thigh. The door handle resembled a detached thumb sticking out of my flesh. This was a problem. One of many. The windshield was gone, just a few jagged splinters left in the frame. The other splinters lay in my lap like a bowl of spilled ice. I shook them loose, groaning. Since there was no longer a door on the driver’s side, getting out of the car did not pose a problem. Cautiously I hauled myself out of what was left of Elaine’s car, planted my feet on the forest floor, and stepped square into a pile of fresh bear shit.
Of all the shit that accumulates on the earth, bear shit, to me, is the least offensive of them all. It gives off no foul stench and more often than not is flecked with raspberry seeds or filled with the husks of blueberries. For all I knew these blueberries were from the same plants Elaine and I had plucked from when we were young and she was not taking potshots at me with a Belgian assault rifle. Given my circumstances I did not mind a little gush of bear marde on my shoes. Nonetheless the crows laughed at me, the ravens honked, the herons barked etc. It’s an inside joke with them: “Man steps in bear shit, ha ha ha.” What a riot. The oldest joke in nature. I was the butt of it. Once again.
Bear shit or not, I needed to get out of there fast. Forget Petronius Totem, I had to stake my claim into Elaine’s heart again before someone else did. The affection of my wife and my very children was at stake. The world was full of slimy vampire killers who were all blogging and writing vampire novels in their spare time and working on a script for the miniseries. I knew that. They would pounce on Elaine like wolves on meat.
“Elaine,” I cried into the forest.
A thunderbolt cracked the sky, sounding more like a slammed telephone than was necessary. Or maybe two jumbo-sized chicken drones had crashed head-on up there. Either way Elaine was not listening. Nature was not paying much attention either. Hardly ever does. Nature, it seemed, had gone entirely digital. At that moment a flock of geese in formation shot overhead like a span of aircraft. Red robotic eyes scanned the shoreline dissecting the forest floor in precise quadrants as they moved inland. Surveillance geese, probably. Top-of-the-line Deli Special drones. I had the creepy feeling that they were searching for Petronius Totem too. They had that look about them.
Despite my injuries I scrambled back up the rock. How I made it up the embankment is not clear; probably it was love. The road was still dark; a few splashes of the rising sun fell on it. The pavement steamed, stars smouldered and strained behind the clouds, and the air hung stiff above the trees. I pushed myself over the cable rail and made the other side; the grind of stones sounded beneath my shoes. Overhead a few more stray scout-birds flew in a straight line; these ones resembled cormorants, ghostly and covetous. No doubt their insatiable intestines were loaded like bomb bays with deadly acidic shit. The gust of a familiar stench blew from the shore, that rank combination of dead fish, global finance, and rotted seaweed that has become so familiar to the world. I tottered forward with the dark surface of Superior stretching to the south, the massifs on the other side, jet black.
The first vehicle came sighing from the west and I hid from it like a cowardly dog, lugging my injured leg over the guardrail and crouching in the bracken and the moist ferns and fens etc. Another vehicle flew past. When it was gone I returned to the road and resumed walking, or at least limping. A car came blazing double-white around the rock cut and once again I hid in the weeds.
I was getting sick of this dance.
In a few moments a car rushed up behind me on the pavement like the sound of the wind in my ear and this time I did not flinch. I walked upright, like a man. Big mistake. I should have flinched and whimpered and bowed and scraped and compromised my integrity, sold out quick, and got out of there as fast as I could. But no. Not me. I had to be Mr. Integrity. Mr. Upright Guy.
The car stopped ten paces in front of me and a long thin scarecrow of a man in a green suit leapt out on the driver’s side. He looked like a reptile and he was holding a gun.
“Get in the car, asshole.”
“I’d rather walk, thank you.”
The first bullet missed; the second singed the hair above my temple.
“Okay, hold your fire. I’m a literary artist.”
I allowed myself to be folded into the back seat of the car. I was not alone there. A dark, brooding man with a hat pulled down over his eyes sat pressed to the far door, his long hands wrapped in leather gloves, tapping his fingers on his knees, the knees in turn knocking against each other. This would be the Muscle of course, the half-man half-monster who does not show his face but keeps it hidden out of shame over what he has done, and is about to do again. This one’s face was concealed beneath fascist drug-cartel wraparound sunglasses like the cops wear, and his finely manicured murderer’s hands were hidden beneath black leather gloves. He seemed familiar somehow but he did not look at me. They never look at you. Instead he removed one of those miniature devices from his pocket and stared at the glowing screen, his fingers flying across the face of it. Texting, I think it’s called. Even with his gloves on he was good at it. I was already dead meat to him. A hunk of analog. I was a tweet, at best. The brown grip of a Colt .45 butted from inside his jacket.
“Read any good books lately?” I asked. I was careful not to look at him. They don’t like that.
Up front the driver, the gangster who’d shot me, laughed. “That’s good, Petro. Real good. You’re a regular comedian, aren’t you?” He sought out my eyes in the rear-view mirror. “What’s that sticking out of your leg, pal?”
“It’s a door handle.”
“Door handle? Jesus Christ. You make sure you don’t bleed on my upholstery, Petro, right? You don’t mind if I call you Petro, do you, Petro?”
“My name is Jack Vesoovian. I’m a literary artist, a writer, if you must.”
“A what?” He grimaced; a gold tooth flashed in the mirror. I recognized that tooth and the thin dry lips that surrounded it, and I recognized the grimace. I never forget a grimace. Not even after years. Most of all I recognized the green suit. It was no longer polyester but that was all that could be said in its favour.
“A writer.” I repeated. “One who writes. Moral arbiter of the universe.”
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said.
Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. The man’s suit was killing me. There are suits that do that. “Listen mister, I know a good tailor.” This turned out to be the wrong thing to say. Green Suit nodded in the mirror at Mr. Muscle and the goon fired a fist straight from his right shoulder and into my jaw.
“You listen to me, shithead, I already have a tailor. Great tailor. Right off the shtetl in Galicia. This is a great tailor. Jewish tailor, are you kidding? The best. Saville Row wanted this guy. We got him out of there in a sealed boxcar. Just like Stalin.”
“Lenin,” I said.
“What?”
“Lenin. The boxcar thing was Lenin. Stalin was the guy who killed Gorky with a poisoned cake.”
He gave a gloomy look into the
rear-view mirror. “You talk some serious shit, you know that?” His fingers were at his neck, adjusting his collar.
“You don’t like the suit? Your guy can do a better suit than this?”
“No, it’s …”
“What?”
I confessed to him that it was the collar.
“There’s nothing wrong with this collar.”
“For surfing on,” I said under my breath.
I must have said some of this over my breath because Green Suit slammed the brakes, put the car into a fishtail, and stopped in the middle of the highway with the nose pointing the way we’d come. I could smell the rubber burning on the highway.
“Ronny, take Mr. Asshole down to the lake and shoot him three times in the head.”
Ronny hauled me out of the car and into the rain, manhandling me down the embankment with the practiced ease of the trained hit man. They have community colleges for these guys now. They give out diplomas. Several martial arts tactics came to my mind; mostly they required me running away, but it was too late for that. I could barely limp.
Down we went into the shadows and the surf-sound and the obelisks of black stone that heaved through the twisted roots. Superior ranted against the stones, the bobcats whistled. We stopped together, and I felt the touch of a gun barrel on the back of my neck. It was not the first time. I knew the drill: time for me to go to my knees. Time for writer-boy to beg for forgiveness just for the fun of it, like Lorca, because after I was finished begging, Mr. Not Nice Guy was going to shoot me three times in the head, and once in the ass for being queer, like Lorca. Ha ha ha. What a riot these guys were.
My eyes were shut.
Once again I was about to die. Like every other literary artist before me I was about to die forgotten in a ditch at the side of the Trans-Canada Highway, beneath a blackened train trestle and a faded “dew worms for sale” sign, with a bullet in my brain. At least I didn’t have to dig my own grave like Lorca, or Babel. It was thin consolation, but it was something.