by Peter Unwin
“We need to clean this bloody thing up.” I had the uncanny sense I had spoken those words before, more than once, that I had only spoken those words and no others, uttering them again and again to the woman I loved. We need to clean this mess up: the mantra that a man repeats endlessly unto his death without ever once changing the vacuum cleaner bag or getting down the Easy-Off.
“We,” said Elaine. “We?” She attempted to cock the rifle and get off one more shot but in her rage the mechanism jammed. “You are not a we.” Her voice was straining. “You are entirely a you. Do you hear me, you, you … you … you stinking, lying, self-medicating, bohemian triumphalist, garret poet elitist. You privileged deadbeat poetry-writing cocksmoking freelance journalist, you, you phallogocentric white male author!”
I have been called a number of things in my life. I’ve been referred to in print, with full honours, as the Antichrist. I have been called a communist, a liberal, a parasite, a non-celebrity, a fascist, and falsely, and most damning of all, “a person from Toronto.” My own mother called me names that fifteen years of psychotherapy have not enabled me to share with anyone but complete strangers after too many drinks. Like you, I have suffered the slings, the arrows, the shotgun blasts, and the kicks in the teeth of outrageous fortune without giving a shit, but this was beyond the pale. Phallogocentric? Okay, who isn’t? A white male, okay. There have been times when, for lack of a more precise term, I could have been lumped in with that unseemly crowd and all the honky, tight-assed, genocidal horn-dog stereotypes that go with it. But to be called an “author,” in my own home, or at least Elaine’s home, in front of my own son, was more than anyone can be expected to tolerate.
“Elaine.” I spoke with considerable dignity. “I’m afraid I must ask you to watch your tongue. I am not an author, I am an artist! My name is Jack Vesoovian, the Jack Vesoovian, and I am an artist! A literary artist. My oeuvre is life. My métier is words.”
“Author,” she spit.
“Artist!”
“Author! Successful author. You are going to end up being interviewed on the radio just like the rest of them.”
“Successful? How dare you?”
“Successful!”
If there is one thing about Elaine it’s that she’s an expert at the low blow. “No, I’m not,” I answered, again with dignity. “I will never be successful. I will never submit to that humiliation.”
She sneered at me. “Oh, yes you are. You’re just another dumbfuck author who’s going to write some bullshit overwrought family saga novel set in the past in which simplicity is equated with moral honesty and an overblown poetic gassiness conceals a complete lack of ideas or originality. Probably there will be horses in it and a well-intentioned union leader and a wounded heroine who finds her identity and discovers herself as a person after confronting her demons in a chapter-long set piece written in the present tense that involves a scene in a Native sweat lodge. Face it. You’re no better than Kingsley fucking Amis.”
“Who?”
“Or Petronius Totem. Author,” she spat. “That’s all you are.”
“Elaine,” I repeated sternly, “that’s no way to speak in front of a child, and you know it.”
Alex, in fact, was grinning from one side of his head to the other.
“Face it, Dad. You’re an author,” he chirped. “Someone’s got to do it.”
“Watch your mouth,” I said.
Without warming Elaine shouldered the rifle and managed to get off a single, lucky shot that took off about a fifth of my right earlobe.
I tried to be reasonable. “Elaine, look. I came to you as a man, as an equal, and as a possible candidate in a long list, a very long list, of possible father figures to your children. I’ve come on a journey of love and what do you do? You shoot me. Twice. It’s not enough that I’ve been stabbed in the thigh by a three-hundred-pound Lacanian from Alberta, but I have to be shot in front of a child. Really? Elaine.”
At the height of my indignation the still-smouldering heap of techno-bird flesh shuddered and heaved. A tentacle slithered from its mouth, or where its mouth should have been, ticked on the carpet, and then went still. Alex took the opportunity to park himself in front of the TV where a team of bikini-clad heart surgeons urged him to invest in a drug to combat erectile dysfunction. Outside an ambulance sang in the streets. A moment of tenderness flitted onto Elaine’s sturdy face, or at least I thought it did.
“Elaine,” I said, throatily.
“Asshole,” she said, and shot me once more: a meaningless flesh wound but one that inflicted further damage to my pride.
“Fine.” I drew myself up to my rightful stature. “I refuse to be one of those men who overstays his welcome.” With those words ringing through the room, I swept out the door.
3.4
THE SIGN OF PETRONIUS
SHOT, STABBED, BLEEDING from three separate bullet holes, punctured by knitting needles, and suffering from the same stubborn self-esteem issues that have dogged me for most of my life, I trod through the dark streets of Steel Town. I felt little anger toward Elaine. As far as I was concerned her mind had been warped by two decades of Female Transformation Novels (FTNS) and by a half century of oh-so-intricate Finely Wrought Psychological Masterpieces (FWPMS) chock full of detailed characterizations, carefully thought-out plot arcs, and edgy thematic transitions etc. It was not her fault. Western literature had conspired to bring her down. It was Rilke’s fault. Again. That prick.
Homeless, I walked the dirty streets of the city, searching for an all-night laundromat to sleep in. I considered trying to find Petro, but I lacked a phone, a number or address, or any desire for male companionship. The night had gone cold and damp and the air gave off a fragrance of linden trees and fried chicken: the new fried chicken, the New Society chicken, the edible airborne stuff everyone was talking about. “Food for the future,” they called it.
Visibility was down to fifty feet, but my legs knew the way. They were home. They took me through lanes of memory where the roses had grown. Thank God for my legs. What few storefronts I made out in the foggy blur were boarded shut and drooled with graffiti. A blast of cinder flakes scratched my neck. How did that happen? The steel mill was shut down. How come a low continuous drone was coming from that direction? What were they doing in there? What Frankenstein experiment was going on in there now in the name of Science and takeout fried chicken? In front of me rose the green and white municipal signs that loomed everywhere in the city. “Do Not Feed The Pigeons. Do not Feed the Pigeons.”
Pigeons my ass. Did they think we were stupid? Of course they thought we were stupid. They banked on it. Our stupidity was crucial to the whole global chicken enterprise.
Overhead the clatter of large moving bird-creatures broke the silence. Whatever flew in that sky was no bird known to me, and I know my birds. I know the rustle of a cormorant on the wing. I know the distinct fanning whoosh of a goose. This was not that. Not owl either. A form of evil fowl it was, fouling the night. A battalion of beasts slouched airborne toward the steel plant.
I had read things about that plant alright: how a German genetics company based in Frankfurt had relocated there, teaming up with Leggit’s Catering & Fibre Optics. It was in the news. It was the news, it was all you could read about. A partnership that was putting Hamilton on the map, the way it had put Labrador City on the map after they’d first market-tested their early prototypes out of the Chinese Wall restaurant there. The world’s first computer-enhanced fried chicken that could actually fly — EDT: Edible Drone Technology. “Colonel Sanders Eat Your Heart Out!” The slogan brayed from public loudspeakers day and night for months. High-paid media chicken pundits could not crow loud enough; the genius of this plan, they clucked, was to stitch the deep-fried bits together with fibre optic cable, and have the genetically reanimated bird fly through a 60 MB/second dedicated broadband channel straight to the customer’s house without the aid of a delivery person, and powered by nothing more than a 56K modem. T
he idea had been hailed as a breakthrough for the overworked super mom and the Canadian high-tech industry, Revolutionary Fried Chicken (RFC). The papers went crazy about it, running full-page stories. Not being a chicken lover at the time, I paid no attention.
Now, in the aftermath of my latest misunderstanding with Elaine, combined with the mangled techno-poultry that lay on her carpet, I began to scrutinize these details. It appeared that flocks of digital fried Frankenchickens, artificially boosted with calcium and steroids, were about to make their way across the sky and descend onto the dinner tables of houses cozier than mine. There they would be gobbled down by children who were loved and whose video-game addiction was carefully monitored by a device locked to their wrist.
I refused to get maudlin about this.
The city streets remained fog-shrouded. A cycloptic car with a burnt-out headlight roared past, followed by pariah dogs, about two dozen of them, all looking like former show dogs disqualified for doping violations. In their disgrace, they sniffed from one garbage can to the next. One of them even appeared to recognize me.
“Brandy,” I cried out, aware from my abortive experience as a file clerk at the SPCA that Brandy was the most common name for a Canadian dog. Common or not, the dog gave me an icy look indicating I had stepped beyond my station. Immediately it stuck its nose into the rectal membranes of a Rottweiler.
Fine.
I moved on beneath a soft rain of ash, stopping only to sneeze. When the sneeze was over, I saw it.
The sign.
The sign bearing the face of Petronius Totem. My old friend was on a sign. More than a sign, he was on a honking big billboard. There was that blatantly photogenic, plangent, clear-eyed face in a familiar pose. The pose was Thomas Phillips’ portrait of Lord Byron all over again, the one with the big eyes and the fat lips.
The weight of Peter’s ego alone seemed to cause the billboard to totter forward into a bank of chokecherry bushes. The burden of his name was carrying it down. Not Pete Tidecaster, but the new faux classical celebrity golden-boy author’s nom de plume in lights and forty-foot letters. Petronius Totem™ had been born:
TEN THOUSAND BUSTED CHUNKS
The Life of Petronius Totem
If you read only one book in your life
Make sure this is the one!
Searching for
Petronius Totem
4.0
TEN THOUSAND BUSTED CHUNKS
AFTER A LONG and mainly therapeutic restacking of my fifty crates of books I left my room and went on the road for the second time in search of Petronius Totem. I put Elaine’s nasty Post-it Note in my wallet and walked out of my seedy and now roommate-less Barton Street rooming house at five o’clock in the afternoon, and drove Elaine’s car straight into a flesh-coloured moon and eventually an outpouring of stars that did not seem meant for me but for someone else. For Petro maybe, or Elaine.
After several hours of desperate driving I was far enough north to be safe from chicken drones and protoype fibre optic cyborg crows that were increasingly filling the sky. At least I hoped I was. The looming granite walls flashed by on either side, while a Triple A baseball game sputtered from the radio. The play-by-play broke though the static and ushered me into the flat accent of the American Midwest rolling across the Great Lakes: “Thornstein on second, two out, hee’ya’s the pitch …”
Despite the welcome rhetoric of baseball, I was troubled by what I was doing. Instead of confronting my screw-up with Elaine head-on, I was driving vaguely north, in Elaine’s car no less, her ex-car, in search of a very sketchy character who had by most accounts vanished off the face of the earth: Petronius Totem, the self-proclaimed ectoplasmic spasmodical, and briefly celebrated, author.
As the miles passed, long-buried Pete Tidecaster stories emerged from my memory. There he was, the former snotty-nosed kid with the gap between his teeth. There was the rickety tree fort we built that the fire department immediately knocked down, only to discover our little porno den packed top to bottom with soaked and spongy stacks of girlie magazines stolen from the bottom drawers of our father’s dressers. It made me smile, I think, or contort my lips in a way that looked like a smile. When I checked myself in the rear-view I didn’t like what I saw. Smile or not.
I remembered all sorts of things. I remembered that day we ran famished into Pete’s two-storey red Insulbrick house that sagged with age and forever emitted a tribe of brothers and sisters who were oversized, loudmouthed, sexually precocious, and dangerous. They wandered in and out and then left or stayed, according to what sort of shape their parents were in or how much food was in the fridge. It was in that dark house so gothically featured in Ten Thousand Busted Chunks that I encountered Pete’s dad asleep on the kitchen floor beside the smeared cat bowls. Peter scornfully stepped over the man and hauled a hefty jar of peanut butter from the cupboard. In the Tidecaster residence there was no shortage of peanut butter; each of the Tidecaster children seemed to be in possession of their own personal jar. We sat at the table and feasted while Peter’s father made an ineffectual effort to raise himself from the floor. After each try he clattered down and muttered, “Get out of my way, witch,” followed up with, “Fee fi bloody fum, God damn the Englishman!” Then he settled into a glazed and deep snore.
Peter gouged into the jar of peanut butter and regarded his father with majestic contempt.
“My old man the boozer,” he said, and began to tinker with the wires of a broken-up calculator attached to a crystal radio that sat on the table along with several screwdrivers and some dirty cutlery. Even at an early age Pete was a tinkerer.
At that point Peter’s mother drifted into the kitchen dressed in a terrifying blue negligee that seemed to be made up of a million butterfly wings all sewn together and all of them swishing when she moved. She did not so much walk into the kitchen as float into it, skimming over her husband without looking down and moving instinctively to the refrigerator, on top of which stood a clear glass cookie jar packed with pills.
She swept down the jar, cradled it on her hip like a bongo, unscrewed the top, and dug out a handful of blue, red, and green pills that she hurled into her mouth and washed down with a gulp of milk from a quart container. Wiping the froth from her lips she held me with an intense glare. Her eyes sizzled in the way of women who are cross-addicted and have given up their dance careers to live at home with disagreeable alcoholic husbands.
“You certainly are a very nice boy, aren’t you? A big one too, very big. Bigger than that no good shitless miserable drunken stinking husband of mine at the best of times! You remind me of the Colonel, but you wouldn’t know the Colonel, would you? Who knows the Colonel anymore? No one knows the Colonel, do they? WHO KNOWS THE COLONEL?” she screamed, then collected herself and said primly, “Colonel Roxy Rothanfel, the greatest Impresario the world has ever known, that’s all. That man could smell talent, smell it through the tips of his fingers. A genius. Never give the public want they want, he said. Give them more than what they want. Immortal words. A great man. One of the Immortals.”
She stopped, stared at nothing, then resumed. “That was then, wasn’t it? Back then when the world still understood the value of a good theatrical agent and a lady was treated like a lady. Before your time, of course, the Colonel. But oh my God, big. We, the girls, we called him Mr. Ten and a Half, didn’t we?” She made a measure with her hands, the way a man indicates the size of a fish. “So tell me big boy, do you have a nice namey?” She leaned in close and unleashed a suffocating onslaught of dysfunctional love into my face. I held my breath.
“His namey is Alice,” snorted Peter.
Before I could summon up the courage to speak, or even exhale, Peter’s father made a feeble attempt to get up from the floor, and managed to hoist himself as far as his hands and knees before bellowing, “If today is my goddamn birthday, then what the hell day is it? Answer me that, Einstein, you smartasses!” No sooner had he posed this strange question than his limbs gave out; he was back o
n the floor, snoring great gales of noise and sputum.
Peter looked on disgusted. He was eight years old and already his family had become an enormous burden to him. “Mom,” he said briskly. “It’s two-thirty, your show’s on.” Peter’s mother snapped to attention and put her finger to her lips.
“Oh,” she sighed, exiting the room in a confused swish as Peter re-engaged with the peanut butter, sighing.
“What a crew, my dad the boozer, my mom the pill head, and my sister the whore.”
As he spoke one of his many sisters descended from upstairs. This one, Linda, or Belinda, came down beneath a cascade of brown hair that was loose and tangled. She had on a torn T-shirt that read across the front of it, “Nice Boobs.” Beneath the T-shirt a pair of slinky underpants narrowed in a triangle. She was followed down the stairs by a bald man in a suit who chucked her twice under the chin and left in a hurry. No sooner was he out the door than one of Peter’s brothers bolted in through it, holding a stereo console under his arm and bleeding over the left eye.
“The cops,” he cried, leaping over his collapsed father and dashing out the back door, followed at once by two panting and hefty police officers, both with guns drawn. The pair paused long enough to take a bead on Peter’s father. I was sure that Peter was on the verge of shouting, “Shoot the bastard,” but instead he jerked his thumb to the back door. “That way!” he said.
As soon as the police officers made their exit, three stout, serious-looking women from Children’s Services came in and removed Peter, mid-sandwich, from his house and placed him in the care of a highly regarded foster home where, according to Ten Thousand Busted Chunks, he was beaten, sodomized, brainwashed, ritualistically tortured, drugged, starved, and forced to watch American television.
5.0
KIDS, SHE SAID, I WANT THEM NOW
I DROVE THE NEXT several hundreds of miles in the dark. The baseball game had broken down into white noise and static. I had sunk into a deep hole, my Elaine-Hole, in which I saw myself banished from the love of my wife and children. The scrub shot by but it meant nothing to me. Just scrub, waving like drowning shadows in the dark. There was nothing anthropomorphic about this scrub. The weedy reaches of the blueberry mantle did not mean a great deal either. Elaine and I had spent ten summers together in there, stooped in the sun, laughing and picking thistles, scooping blueberries by the handful into a battered Montreal Expos baseball cap before tipping them into an empty margarine container in the cooler.
