Searching for Petronius Totem

by Peter Unwin

  “No, ma’am, I’m not.”

  “Because it sounds like you are.”

  “No, ma’am. Believe me. I’m not doing that. I’m worried about my friend. He’s gone missing on Lake Superior. He’s our last hope, ma’am.”

  “Ernest Buckler was born in West Dalhousie, Nova Scotia. Did you know that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I was born in West Dalhousie, did you know that too, smartass?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Let me guess. Your friend is queer?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s a homo? A bum buddy?”

  “Excuse me, lady. I’m Jack Vesoovian. The Jack Vesoovian. I am calling to report a marine accident.”

  “Now you listen to me, queer-boy. It might surprise you to know that it is not the business of the Ontario Provincial Police to go around rescuing faggot-novelists at taxpayers’ expense. Do you understand? Why don’t you try the Queer Boys’ Writers’ Union, or the Faggot Coast Guard, or one of those Faggots Against Common Decency organizations that set up headquarters in Toronto and chew like termites through the social fabric of the rest of the country. You’re from Toronto, aren’t you! Admit it, admit it, homo. You’re one of those Toronto faggots that we keep hearing about!”

  “I’m from Hamilton,” I cried.

  “Toronto faggot.”

  “Madam, let me guess. You belong to a book club. You write poetry? Intricate, finely honed poetry about your innermost feelings? You write that sort of stuff, don’t you. Admit it.”

  “Poetry is not possible after Auschwitz. You haven’t heard, sir?”

  “Oh yeah, I’ve heard.” I wiped my hand against my mouth and prepared to spew. “Maybe poetry is not possible after Theodor Adorno. Did you ever think of that, lady? Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against Sorbonne-educated midget eggheads who hate jazz, but maybe, just maybe poetry itself played a role, maybe that whole cosmic ‘woe-is-me’ Rilke horseshit made Auschwitz possible? Did you ever consider for a moment that the cult of kulture itself with all that droopy sleep-with-your-sister romanticism and Wagnerian big hair artist-as-hero bullshit served to elevate a pining for mystical absolutism to a level that transcended even the most basic notions of human decency? Did you? Did you, lady, did you?”

  From close by I heard the furious shouting thunder of a voice that sounded familiar and even intimate to me. It was me.

  Elaine plucked a bag of weed from my briefcase, and waved it pointedly in front of my eyes. Clearly in her opinion it was time for me to strap on my feedbag. To appease her I assumed my smarmiest continental horseshit Sorbonne accent. “Madame,” I said. “It has been a pleasure discussing zese matters avec vous.” And I hung up.

  Elaine fell back in the bed with her hands placed firmly over her eyes. Maddy snored softly.

  9.3

  THE LAST BUSTED CHUNKS OF PETRONIUS

  THE NEXT DAY I sat in Luigi’s Italian Canadian Restaurant in Thunder Bay eating the day’s pasta and pickerel special when Elaine appeared with Maddy, both of them fresh from their visit to a Finnish sauna on Bay Street. They looked like steamed clams.

  Elaine dropped a copy of the Thunder Bay Herald Chronicle Journal Reporter on the table in front of me.

  “Once again a member of your peer group has made the news. Your friend,” she said, smiling, “the artist, the con artist fatuously known as Petronius Totem.”

  She flipped the paper over, and there he was.

  They had located Petronius Totem in a tree, unconscious and upside down, washed up on one of the nameless tiny rock protuberances of the Slate Islands archipelago. In sixteen hours the Petronius Totem Circumnavigation of Lake Superior Expedition had managed to drift about six hundred yards in a westerly direction, before being blown straight back almost to the exact position he had started out from.

  The first few substantial waves had sent Petro’s emergency IV whiskey-dispensing unit over the side. Further waves ripped away the authentic two-foot Turkish hookah and six cans of tuna, and tossed them all to the icy bottom. From that point onward the world’s first solo circumnavigator of Lake Superior would be forced to survive on a Georges Simeon novel, a homemade package of brownies baked for him by a ninety-two-year-old woman who claimed to be his biggest fan, and two mickeys of scotch, sunk in a mesh bag and connected to the inner tube by a nylon float rope.

  About an hour into the storm a rogue wave redirected him east instead of west. The next series of waves lifted him further backwards, and up to heights of two and a half storeys, wedging him, finally, where the world was to find him, upside down between two black spruce trees.

  The photograph was the last public photograph of Petronius Totem I would see. It resembled something unearthed from the deepest, darkest, and most dreaded depths of an Internet porn site. There was the black apocalyptic landscape, the blasted tree, looking like a camera-shy sexual deviant caught in the act. There hung Petronius Totem, the dismembered and disgraced loser-tramp advocate of incomprehensible art, in desperate need of a hanging. It did not help that the four-ounce bag of pot bulged from beneath the crotch of his jeans, giving the appearance of a man in the throes of a full-blown porn-movie erection. The pic was snapped from the ground by one of the CH-149 Cormorant helicopter rescue teams who then airlifted Petro to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Thunder Bay where his wetsuit was peeled off.

  The police were called, and he was busted. “BUSTED CHUNKS AUTHOR BUSTED,” crowed the Thunder Bay Herald Chronicle Journal Times Reporter. The cutline read, HANGING BY A THREAD, but Petro wasn’t hanging by anything.

  He was getting eviscerated.

  It seems to me now that Petro was finally done in, not by a storm, but by a type of well-deserved female animosity. At long last he had worn out his unwelcome. Even Mother Nature had had it with Petro. All those red-hot love poems he had written, his heartfelt declarations of amour unto death in which the woman’s name at the top of the note was written in pencil so it could be changed later, the bounced cheques, the missed alimony, the unpaid-for wedding cakes, the alleged kidnappings and the assaults. On that day womankind itself had thundered, “No more, shithead,” and chucked Petro like a dirty dishrag into the greasy laundry bin of his own masculine privilege.

  BY THE TIME the storm was over Petronius was done. From that moment on he became an ongoing living obituary written by that same envious hack from Biggar, Saskatchewan, who took it upon himself to balance the Petronius Totem ledger sheet. The young man’s name was O’Leary; he’d earned his journalistic chops by writing promotional copy for a company that manufactured tongue-depressors. Beginning with Petro’s first grant of $2,300 from a provincial arts organization for a book titled Unwritten Stories, a ninety-eight-page collection that in its finished format consisted of ninety-eight blank pages, the reporter went on to total every grant, bursary, teaching honorarium, prize, travel grant, and expenses claim that Petro had ever attempted to cash in. These, O’Leary calculated, reached the sum of $472,000, and did not include the $112,000 in legal fees that four times covered the hiring of a defence team to protect Petro against obscenity and public mischief charges. More damaging was the helicopter that had clattered its way through Kamp Kan Lit in search of the missing girls. Who would have known it costs $75,000 an hour to operate a CH-149 Cormorant search-and-rescue helicopter?

  Then came the Road Book/Book Road reckoning, with itemized calculations for the hourly rate of ambulance usage, police presence, emergency hospitalizations, and most devastating, the dispatching from the Shilo military base of a tank and four troop carriers, generously supported by the taxpayer at the cost of approximately $270,000. The cost of the spent shell that obliterated the world’s largest Coca-Cola can on the outskirts of Portage la Prairie was calculated at $730, along with the cost of rebuilding the world’s largest Coca-Cola can: $5,200.

  He had even managed to dredge up the old Condoms for Christ campaign, and it featured prominently in the accounting. Against my better judg
ment I had helped Petronius toss five thousand brightly-coloured condoms into a teeming mass of Catholic virgins assembled in Coronation Park for International Catholic Youth Week. I rode the back end of a two-seater bicycle, with Petro up front in full Jesuitical gear — which he had rented from a prop company ($87.50) — heaving handfuls of condoms into an assembled mob of earnest young people, all of them swaying and staring glass-eyed at a large video screen on which the Pope was pontificating. Because of him our biweekly away game at Coronation Park against the League of the Apocalypse was cancelled. That we should miss even a single minute of a baseball game just because some old guy from Italy had showed up with a stiff neck and a need to proselytize virgins infuriated Petro to no end. “It’s a matter of separation between church and state! Don’t you get that?” Holding a rented bullhorn to his lips ($21.34) and intoning with a bogus but rather cool-sounding Latin enunciation, Petronius wore himself hoarse: “Come on my children, the time be upon us, give it up for God!”

  It is reasonable to say the Canadian taxpayer does not respond warmly to dishing out $2,200 for brightly coloured rubber prophylactics purchased from a store called Diddle Me Darlin. When that store is located in downtown Toronto and owned and operated by a flamboyant transgendered couple who habitually wink at the camera and address the reporter as “big boy,” the response is positively icy.

  Petro did not help his cause with his un-sober public proclamation that Canada was facing a deadly pandemic of youthful celibacy. “Young people today are simply not having enough sex,” he insisted. To correct this situation Petronius proposed (in a signed, limited-edition flyer pasted to approximately one thousand Toronto telephone poles — $112.16) that a new national holiday be created: “Sex Day.” Sex Day would, if Petronius had his way, replace the holiday formerly known as Christmas. His written effort to convince Parliament to replace Christmas with a casual sex holiday to be called either Sex Day or SeXmas was met coolly to say the least. The cost of this campaign (including $16.25 for four Scotch tape dispensers required to tape the flyers to the poles), along with the Condoms for Christ campaign was calculated, unfairly, it seemed to me, at $9,330.

  In conclusion, O’Leary reckoned the artist still known as Petronius Totem had cost the Canadian taxpayer nearly one million two hundred thousand dollars, and the numbers were climbing fast. He had been flown to a writers’ retreat in Victoria, BC ($840). He had been provided with free sandwiches (ham and cheese) while appearing as a guest lecturer at an Ottawa Valley community centre ($5.75). He had made five personal donations to a Toronto sperm bank and claimed the return streetcar fares as a research deduction on his income tax form ($25.75).

  On TV I saw a battered, unshaved, incoherent Petro mercilessly hounded by a mob of fresh-faced newly-minted journalists thrusting microphones and digital recording devices into his weary face. They all looked to be fifteen years old.

  “Mr. Totem, sir, do you realize you have cost the Canadian taxpayer nearly two million dollars?”

  Petro scratched his face. He looked like the Ancient Mariner on a bender.

  “Two million?”

  “How can you justify that, Mr. Totem?”

  Petro wedged his right forefinger into his ear, removed it, and examined carefully whatever gunk was to be found there. What was to be found there, of course, was earwax, a good healthy glob of old-fashioned pre-digital Canadian earwax, and he examined it intensely on national television. Finally, he tore his attention from the glob and spoke.

  “Well … I mean, you get what you pay for, don’t you?”

  Petro was going down. The Kaffeine of Kanada was down to the dregs. He was no longer in charge of the spectacle. From now on he would be on the receiving end of it. He was the fraud incarnate, caught with his pants down. Even better, he was the fraud of contemporary art, in which good old-fashioned Group O’ Seven landscapes had been kicked over in favour of Piss Christ and menstrual pad sculptures. He was the urban-elite garret-dwelling internationalist incarnate who refused to give in to the sheer empty display of loquacious drivel and who wrote poetry out of fingernails and broken cinder blocks. He composed stories that did not have ink and improvised ear-splitting tenor sax solos that went on for five months. He was the prophet who insisted on the ecstatic everyday commonplace chaos of living and now he was busted.

  He was busted ten thousand times.

  There he was, on national television, scrutinizing a chunk of earwax. It looked like good enough old-fashioned Canadian earwax to me, but as far as the public was being told, it was the earwax of a fraud. It was state-subsidized earwax. He didn’t deserve that earwax.

  FINALLY THOUGH, it was not the earwax or the two million bucks that did Petro in. It was Ten Thousand Busted Chunks. The book would eventually garner three obscenely fat literary awards, all of which Petro predictably refused to accept. Simpering literary types had outsimpered themselves over Chunks: “a staggering work of honesty … a book that will change your life … a heartwarming reaffirmation of humanity under fire …” It was the book that finally proved to the world that a Canadian childhood could be just as abusive as any childhood in Paris or New York or Shanghai. There was the black-mouthed forever-drunk train engineer father with the monocle and the stiff military moustache who ditched a one-hundred-car freight train into a canola field near Orangeville and was discovered by a farmer sound asleep on the engine room floor with a bottle of Canadian Club stuffed down his pants. There was the Mom, always capitalized, a former burlesque dancer and failed vaudevillian whose grandfather had been blown to smithereens at Vimy Ridge; the monstrous foster mother who seemed a combination of Ma Barker, Squeaky Fromme, and Frida Kahlo. Afternoon lady television hosts had wept golf ball–sized tears over Petro’s ability to survive the predations of sodomite foster dads, drug-pedalling Children’s Aid Workers, serial-killer babysitters, axe-murdering pederast mailmen, and the whole ghoulish cabal of sex-pervert policemen and flesh-eating grandmothers who sweep down on any poor kid who plans to write an old-fashioned bestselling dysfunctional family memoir. Then there was the grown-up Petro, having fled to Toronto where he lived for four lonely years in the trunk line of a Toronto sewer at the base of Roncesvalles and Queen St., perfecting his art, living off the occasional rat that he barbecued on a rusted hibachi, and sleeping on a red sofa cut into quarter sections and reassembled underground….

  It took a phone call, a single phone call to a meek baldheaded director at Serenity House in Vanier, a halfway house that catered to middle-class drunks who sullenly sipped from coke cans filled with rye during their court-ordered AA meetings. With that single phone call it became apparent that not only had Petro not been ritualistically tortured there by a six-foot-four tattooed Jesuit with a penis ring, but that in fact no tattooed Jesuit with or without a penis ring had ever been employed there. “We’re a lay organization,” explained the director. Nor for that matter had a Peter Tidecaster or Petronius Totem ever been admitted as a client.

  It turned out that Petro’s “staggering work of honesty” was not so honest after all. The porno films featuring his mother doing the Kama Sutra with a troupe of circus performers, supposedly filmed in Petro’s living room when he was a boy, had never been made. Those gut-wrenching Narcotics Anonymous meetings in which souls were bared in church basements and heartwarming affirmations of recovery were uttered under the influence of strong coffee? It was all bullshit: no hearts were warmed, no affirmations were affirmed. No coffee got brewed. Even those endless cocaine binges were not so endless after all, and amounted, it turned out, to two or three verifiable snorts at a stag for a writer of concrete poetry who later cashed in and became a torts lawyer. Petro, in fact, since the age of thirteen had been nothing more frightening than an old-fashioned Canadian pothead who later in life had gone over to the dark side of beer, spirits, and the occasional champagne split for breakfast.

  Most of the fiery manifestos that glossed the pages of Chunks were found to be stolen from the selected writings of Tommaso Marin
etti. Even the celebrated opening, “I was born of poor but dishonest parents,” was revealed to be a crib stolen from page 246 of the Bibliesse Edition of Ned Rorem’s New York Diary, who in fact had cribbed it from Ambrose Bierce. It became a journalistic board game to ascertain the literary thefts of Ten Thousand Busted Chunks. Each new revelation was heralded as a victory for common sense and further proof, if that was needed, of the perfidy of all those hucksters who called themselves artists. This is Not a Pipe? Guess what, shithead? It was a pipe after all, you sucker. The public was fed up to here with Magritte and Piss Christ and neon abortions that floated in jars and sold for two million American. They were fed up with over-sexed, poetry-quoting, potheaded alcoholic products of broken families and liberal arts education who did not have a job, a mortgage, and a cottage in the Muskokas, and who did not play industrial league hockey after coming home from work. Petronius was busted. Ten thousand times he was busted.

  AFTER PETRO WAS cut down from that scabby bare tree on a rocky outcrop off the shores of Lake Superior, he began to disappear for good. He became the artist formerly known as the artist formally known as Petronius Totem, reduced to a piece of phallic hieroglyphic graffiti. The interviews dried up, the great draperies of his verbiage became a thing of the past. He was at best a spoken word artist who sometimes appeared on the stages of local clubs, accompanied by me playing a modified fishing rod. Otherwise he was reduced to the scathing recitation of the lying cheating phoniness of Ten Thousand Busted Chunks. It was payback time: “Canadian Soldiers Die in Afghanistan while Artists Spin Web of Lies.”

  The Minister of Culture and Confinement appeared on national television and announced to the country that the age of entitlements was over; all those starving artists who weighed one hundred and ten pounds or more, who had previously received entitlements and were not in fact medically starving and could not provide a doctor’s letter indicating what level of starvation they had attained, were now disentitled. All funding for the arts (except the opera) would be discontinued. “A savings,” he crowed, “of three point seven billion dollars a year.” Behind him a contingent of overweight men wearing green suits and wraparound sunglasses applauded and nodded heads. “We will take that money, every last cent of it,” gloated the Minister, “and we’ll combine it with good old-fashioned Canadian know-how, and with the cooperation of Leggit Industries we will build the greatest prison system that the free world has ever seen!”