Searching for Petronius Totem Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY PETER UNWIN

  The Rock Farmers (stories)

  Nine Bells for a Man (a novel)

  The Wolf’s Head: Writing Lake Superior (non-fiction)

  Hard Surface: In Search of the Canadian Road (non-fiction)

  Life Without Death (stories)

  Canadian Folk: Portraits of Remarkable Lives (biography)

  When We Were Old (poems)

  SEARCHING

  FOR

  PETRONIUS

  TOTEM

  A NOVEL BY

  PETER UNWIN

  © PETER UNWIN 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical — including photocopying, recording, taping, or through the use of information storage and retrieval systems — without prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5E 1E5.

  The author wishes to thank the Ontario Arts Council for supporting this project with a Writers Reserve grant.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Media Fund.

  Freehand Books

  515 – 815 1st Street SW Calgary, Alberta T2P 1N3

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  Book orders: LitDistCo

  8300 Lawson Road Milton, Ontario L9T 0A4

  Telephone: 1-800-591-6250 Fax: 1-800-591-6251

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Unwin, Peter, 1956–, author

  Searching for Petronius Totem / Peter Unwin.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-988298-09-2 (softcover).

  ISBN 978-1-988298-10-8 (epub).

  ISBN 978-1-988298-11-5 (pdf)

  I. Title.

  PS8591.N94S43 2017 c813’.54 c2017-900967-2 c2017-900968-0

  Edited by Barbara Scott

  Book design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design

  For Elaine as always:

  I love you darling, I miss you,

  and I love you, I’m a changed

  man, honey. Honest. I love

  you so much. The kids too.

  JACK

  “How strangely men act!”

  MARCUS AURELIUS

  “I’m out of here!”

  PETRONIUS TOTEM

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I: Pathetic Skirt-Chasing Middle-Aged White Guy with a Drinking slash Drug Problem

  1.0: Elaine

  2.0: The Garret Boys (Existence Exists)

  3.1: Kotchee’s Toes

  3.2: Homebound: Encounter with a Postmodern Assassin

  3.3: WOE: Wrath of Elaine (Big Time)

  3.4: The Sign of Petronius

  II: Searching for Petronius Totem

  4.0: Ten Thousand Busted Chunks

  5.0: Kids, She Said, I Want Them Now

  6.0: Kamp Kan Lit: The Fall of Petro

  6.1: The Fall (First of Many)

  7.0: An Honest Mistake (The Fall of Me)

  8.0: Hot on the Trail

  9.0: Further Fiascos of Petronius Totem: Road Book/Book Road

  9.1: By the Shores of Gitche Gumee

  9.2: Washed Up

  9.3: The Last Busted Chunks of Petronius

  10.0: God’s Hottie

  11.0: The Swan Song

  III: “Put the Coffee On”

  12.0: Resurrection Au Naturel

  13.0: Who Is John Galt?

  14.0: The Bite Me Bait Shop Motel Restaurant and Dance Emporium

  15.0: The Portal

  16.0: The Skin that Wrote Shakespeare

  17.0: In-Coming

  18.0: Out-Going

  19.0: I’m Outta Here

  20.0: “Is Your Mother There?”

  About the Author

  Pathetic Skirt-Chasing

  Middle-Aged White Guy with

  a Drinking slash Drug

  Problem

  1.0

  ELAINE

  TWO MONTHS AFTER my marriage went into the crapper I took my wife’s rotting Ford Sable and hit the road in search of Petronius Totem. My plan, to the extent that I had such a thing, was to get away from Hamilton for a while, reach the former mill towns of Lake Superior where the osprey still whipped down the embankments, and rescue Petro from whatever mess he’d got himself into this time. Failing that I would at least find the guy and give him a lift back to Hamilton if he wanted one. Or maybe, if he didn’t, I’d just shoot the shit with him for a while.

  Really what I was trying to do was survive my latest break-up with Elaine. In one night that woman had packed the intimate objects of our life together into cardboard boxes and insisted I get rid of them, and of me too. Our life together in that two-storey memory box on Aberdeen Avenue was over. No more looking out the window at the heights and the harbour. No more stupid hamsters named Quo Vadis — her idea, not mine. I do not approve of turning pets into literary fetishes. Or vice versa.

  Elaine kept the hamster, the cats, the kids, her crummy Depeche Mode CDS, and a set of Royal Crown Derby handed down by her dotty grandmother. The rest was mine: an empty pizza box with a mouldy crust skidding around inside and Elaine’s Post-it Note on the fridge informing me I was a pathetic skirt-chasing middle-aged white male with a drinking/drug problem who couldn’t see past his masculine privilege and after tonight would no longer have a place to park what she called my “sorry ass.” It was time for me to take a permanent hike. I could have her car if I wanted it. For what it was worth. I would have to get the brakes fixed and the alternator needed to be replaced and the solenoid switch was busted, the windshield was cracked and the muffler needed work.

  In fairness to Elaine, she generously left me fifty plastic Sealtest crates filled with books, my books not hers, mostly first-edition Grove Press that I hauled up the stairs into a semi-unaffordable but relatively cockroach-free poet’s garret on Barton Street across from the prison.

  2.0

  THE GARRET BOYS (EXISTENCE EXISTS)

  ON THAT GRIM STREET where the buses roared and the prison grinned at me, I was once again reduced to sharing a filthy bathroom and a wobbly toilet with men that I did not know. The closest to me, one room over, was an unlikely brown-skinned boy from Truro, Nova Scotia, named Doug. That’s what he called himself, though I now understand that his name was not Doug, but Ronald Muldoon, and that he was not from Truro, Nova Scotia, at all, but from Labrador City, Labrador, where he had spent his days consorting with the criminal business class at the Chinese Wall restaurant and eating the prototype Leggit Fibre Optic chicken specials that were coming on to the market back then. His past was dark and for a period of time no end of private detectives and other shady operatives wearing green polyester suits and alligator shoes knocked at the door of our tenement and demanded to know if a certain Ronald Muldoon was now living, or had ever before lived, in the building.

  Doug was maybe thirty-five years old and so obviously on the run that he barely cast a shadow. A tall, good-looking, muscle-bound former Junior A hockey player with a buzz cut and a smooth avuncular face, he kept the contents of his life, including socks, underwear, and a bantam league Player of the Year hockey trophy, in a nylon hockey bag that he lugged from one lonely rooming house to the next. The “Bag o’ Life,” he called it. His great-grandfather, he informed me with pride, had folded himself into a piano and ridden the Underground Railway
out of Booger Hollow, Arkansas, arriving safely in Truro, Nova Scotia, where he donned the blue uniform of the train porter, and played bass trombone in a Creole-Dixieland quartet. In Truro he married Doug’s great-grandmother, a six-foot-two Swiss suffragette who smoked cigars and was prone to hunger strikes. Doug kept a photo of the two of them in his wallet.

  His room, like mine, contained a spindly table, three vinyl Goodwill chairs, the thick smell of someone else’s fried onions cooked long ago, and a refrigerator that made a racket like a truck. He had hung a framed portrait of Ayn Rand on his wall. What a terrifyingly ravenous face it was, although Doug seemed not to mind. On top of the table lay his neatly assembled stack of Objectivist literature, transported across the country in his Bag o’ Life. Doug, it turned out, was a long-time card-carrying member of the Ayn Rand American Center for Objectivist Research, and wholeheartedly subscribed to their motto, “Existence exists,” which was not something I cared to dispute with him, at least not until my life depended on it.

  Next to Doug, in a larger room, lived Mohammed Mohammed. I believe his full name was Mohammed Mohammed Mohammed, but sometimes we called him Smitty, for expedience and because it was fun. Mohammed Mohammed drove a Beck cab at night, his default career choice after having failed to become an arc welder. He had long clung to the belief that a career as an arc welder would save him from the cold of a Canadian winter and had taken several night courses in welding, but to no avail. The days of getting a job as a welder in Hamilton, arc or otherwise, were long gone.

  One night, on a whim, Doug brought home a pair of second-hand skates in the hope of turning Mohammed Mohammed into the first Eritrean refugee on ice skates, but he refused to lace them up or even look at them. To Mohammed they were instruments of Western decadence. “My friend, I did not come here to die by the skating. It is wrong for the grown man to fall down at the feet of the little children.” He also feared that if he were to go skating, he would get himself struck by the Canadian Pacific northbound that ran up the line by the rink, even though it did so behind a ten-foot-high chain-link fence.

  On weekends Mohammed Mohammed frequented Hanrahan’s tavern in the east end of the city where he frequently mistook Canadian Mohawk girls from Six Nations for homegrown Eritreans, and serenaded them with the love poems of Yemane Barya. When that failed he always brought home the same extremely large prostitute with a sullen attitude, who passed out in the bathroom after locking the door behind her, forcing me and Doug to urinate in our sinks. “Smitty,” I entreated, “cut it out with sullen-looking extremely large prostitutes who pass out in the bathroom forcing Doug and me to piss in our sinks!” Mortification sprang to his thin face. “Ah Jack, you are my friend, forgive me. I have disappointed you, and for this I am sorry.”

  It was hard to stay angry with Mohammed Mohammed. He had been imprisoned in Ethiopia by some humourless capos who tied him to a chair in the local police station, removed three of his fingernails, and tortured him with the ends of their burning cigarettes. I’d seen the scars. They looked like oysters floating across his skinny body.

  IN THAT HOUSE Mohammed Mohammed became my brother, as Doug became my brother. We assembled in brotherly fashion around a wobbly Salvation Army table with a past, topped with chipped Formica, gouged with Depression-era cigarette burns, and standing barely upright in Mohammed Mohammed’s room. In that room we laughed, smoked hashish when we had hashish, and cigarettes when we had those, nursing wounds when we were wounded, eating meals made from tinned sardines, garlic cloves, and tomato paste. We ate like poets. Real poets.

  Taped to the wall above the table was a colour snapshot of Mohammed Mohammed’s mother, an inscrutable, tender-looking woman, darker than himself, held up by a crutch, her left leg missing from the knee down. “A landmine,” explained Mohammed gravely, making it sound as if his mother’s leg had been removed by a religious epiphany and not by a two-dollar explosive device. A number of Coca-Cola cans cut in half, and employed now as flowerpots, ringed the shack behind her. Above the cans a line of fist-sized bullet holes flowered on the wall.

  Except for that photograph, and a pin-up calendar of bikini-wrapped white girls lounging around in a tropical jungle wearing high heels and pouting, we were womanless. Mohammed Mohammed’s overweight prostitute, who passed out in the bathroom the moment he brought her home, barely counted, nor did Elaine who, as previously noted, had cast me out of our home with a Biblical admonition to “get the hell out of my life” and remain that way unto all eternity.

  Doug, despite his leonine beauty, his hockey trophy, and even his commitment to Ayn Rand and Objectivism, also came home alone. The very mention of women made him blush to the toes. Without putting it into words we tried to convince ourselves that we were luxuriating in the freedom of our masculine company with all of its ribaldry and hearty male laughter etc., but we were just lonely, unfinished guys who were going nowhere and we knew it. I knew it.

  Doug must have known it too because one day he vanished. He stuffed his hockey trophy into the Bag o’ Life and left behind a small stack of Objectivist literature on the corner of the table, and a room so spotless it gave no indication he had ever lived in it, or even entered it. Two days after that, Mohammed Mohammed vanished too. He came home and announced he’d lost his taxi-driving licence after falling asleep at the wheel and transporting a terrified American fare through a red light at John and Main. Woefully ashamed, he fled sobbing into the streets, leaving me alone in a rooming house with a shared filthy toilet.

  It was then that, for lack of anything better to do, I hatched my scheme to track down my friend, the thoroughly disgraced and probably dead author, performance artist, and self-described “ectoplasmic spasmodical” formerly known as Petronius Totem.

  [INTERLUDE]

  Searching for

  Petronius Totem:

  The First Fiasco

  3.1

  KOTCHEE’S TOES

  I SHOULD EXPLAIN THAT this was not the first time I had crossed Canada in an effort to find Petronius Totem. I had done the same thing four years earlier, when both of us were working the same shift on the line at Dofasco. Petro was not yet a household name, he was just a poet then, another run-of-the-mill Hamilton poet named Pete Tidecaster in a city filled with mill poets named Pete. When the shift ended he distributed sheets of verse in the parking lot behind the chain-link fences; his first fiery manifesto, The Artificial Insemination of Canadian Poetry, followed by his second fiery manifesto, The Afterbirth of Canadian Poetry. He also sold cheap, homegrown Canadian marijuana out of the lunchroom, but it was not very good marijuana.

  That summer, like every summer, we played on the same beer-league baseball team, The Dofasco Hog Eaters. Our team was not very good and featured a roster made up of refugees from Toronto, Mohawk activists from Six Nations, out-of-work poets, and actors who missed routine fly balls in spectacular fashion. Ever since Stephen Crane it’s been the poets who hold a ball team together; Pete and I were fixtures in the middle of the diamond.

  Twice a month we played away games at Coronation Park in Toronto. In the lush twilights of that park we were thrashed by the Post-Apocalypsos, the Tempura Batters, the Pension Fund Raiders, and other teams with clever postmodern Toronto-sounding names. We played nine hurried innings beneath the old Tip Top Tailors building, with the trees swaying and the city surging all around us, and somewhere in there, mid-season, after too many post-game drinks at Ye Olde Slaughterhouse, Pete went AWOL.

  He simply got up from the table and did not come back. Carly, the first-base woman, received a letter a month later indicating he was holed up in a Vancouver beer joint drinking himself to death.

  I was living on Aberdeen then with Elaine and the kids and I confronted her head-on.

  “Honey,” I said, “I’m flying out to Vancouver to rescue Pete Tidecaster, he’s holed up in some desperate joint and he’s in a bad way again.”

  She looked at me in that way she had of looking at me. “Pete Tidecaster is a stinking drunk,
and the world will be better off when his liver gives out.”

  I should make it clear that Elaine and I were not married in any Old Testament sense of that word. Nonetheless there was something between us. When you live in a woman’s house, feed her hamster, when there are children involved who call you Daddy, and you are reading the same translation of Mayakovsky, then in the eyes of God you’re as good as married if not better and it’s no use pretending you’re not.

  “Honey, when a fellow plays with another fellow on a ball team, something happens, there’s this type of bond that —”

  “Cut the crap. You’re going out there to get stinking drunk with him and spend all your money on bimbos again.”

  I pointed to the kids. “Do you mind not using sexist language around the children?” In fairness to Elaine the kids did not seem to mind; Alex in particular always got a big kick out of it.

  Before I left for the airport I kissed Madeline on the forehead. She was five at the time, and thanks to me and her mom a budding martial arts assassin with an alarming bunion on her left foot: a cutie, even if she did possess a growing list of obsessive-compulsive disorders.

  “Goodbye, sweetheart.”

  “Mommy’s pissed at you.”

  “I know she is, honey.”

  Then I kissed Alex. Alex is the quiet type and didn’t say a word. He was punching away at a video game called Constant Brutal Death.

  SIX HOURS LATER I was in Gastown Vancouver, heading straight into the Dominion Hotel, the last known address for Peter Tidecaster. A sad, sleepy-looking guy stood at the bar wiping draft glasses.

  “I’m looking for Peter Tidecaster.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, I’m a friend of his, from Hamilton.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Yeah. We played on the same baseball team.”

  “Sure you did, mister.”

  “Yeah, I did. Dofasco Hog Eaters.”