Pepsi Bears and Other Stories

  Also by Anson Cameron

  Nice Shootin’ Cowboy

  Silences Long Gone

  Tin Toys

  Confessing the Blues

  Lies I Told About a Girl

  Stealing Picasso

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Pepsi Bears and Other Stories

  ePub ISBN 9781864711738

  A Vintage book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Vintage in 2011

  Copyright © Anson Cameron 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This is a work of fiction. All central characters are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental. In order to provide the story with a context, real names of places are used and a number of high-profile people are also referred to, but there is no suggestion that the events described concerning them ever occurred.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Cameron, Anson, 1961–

  Pepsi bears and other stories / Anson Cameron.

  ISBN 978 1 86471 172 1 (pbk.)

  A823.3

  Cover images by Getty Images, Bigstock

  Cover design by Design by Committee

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Anson Cameron

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Imprint Page

  Pepsi bears.

  Night of the Eurobeaver. (Pepsi bears, Part II)

  Lick it, lizard bitch.

  House of stolen dogs.

  A zebra in no man’s land.

  Eggs illicit.

  This exhibit has been eaten.

  Turtle soup.

  Jesus rides a cash cow.

  Mister Bruce.

  Here is a boar’s left one.

  Poet Laureate of Cats.

  Song of the lyrebird.

  About the author

  Pepsi bears.

  The work experience kid with the afro turns out to be a font of crazy ideas all stolen from his own half-novel called ‘Nike Bears’. His name is Tommy John and he’s doing third-year American Lit/Creative Marketing at Columbia. But for these two weeks he’s landed a gig at Mansey Brothers AdInfinitum, in a fortieth floor communal thinkspace in Madison Avenue. Mansey Brothers AdInfinitum came up with the Smile At A Despot campaign that spiked tourism to Cuba. Mansey Brothers AdInfinitum are worldwide cool. In the communal thinkspace The Ideas Team has been spitballing new ideas for a Pepsi campaign for an hour while Tommy John has sat there semaphoring contempt with his eyebrows. Finally, the Team Leader (pine-lime waistcoat, three wives so far, cocker spaniel groomed by Dahlenbergs) is so pissed off he asks Tommy John, ‘You don’t seem blown away by our stuff, Tommy J. Maybe you’ve got a few ideas of your own re making Pepsi a giant big enough to stomp all over you-know-who?’ The Ideas Team straightens up, leans forward, can’t wait for this little asshole to bomb out so they can waggle their eyebrows at him for a change.

  But the kid’s got something big. It crosses his mind to kick his feet up on the table to tell it, but he decides, no, just deliver flat, like I’m offering up everyday musings instead of gold.

  ‘Polar bears,’ he tells them.

  ‘Polar bears?’ the Team Leader in the pine-lime waistcoat asks.

  ‘Polar bears.’ Cocky little bastard. No elaboration.

  The Ideas Team muses, creatively: arched eyebrows, scowls at the ceiling, puckered lips, noses rubbed on wrists. A young woman with piercings plays the opening bars of Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ on the tabletop. She nods and whispers, ‘The white bear of the North.’

  Tommy John has pinched this idea from his half-finished novel about the domination and destruction of the natural world by Man!! (He uses two exclamation marks every time.) In this half-novel he has a chapter where Nike advertises on the flanks of polar bears. It has occurred to him that these people at Mansey Brothers, being advertising people, might be able to see past the horror of such an idea to its market value.

  ‘Polar bears,’ he smiles now. ‘The last blank canvas. There are only three thousand of them left. And they belong to … no one. Wild and free. And since Attenborough discovered an appetite in dirtbags to ogle weird shit with fangs, these dudes practically each have their own film crew beaming their every defecation and fornication back to the burbs of the world.’ Tommy John is on a roll. His feet do find their way to the table top. ‘They’re major film stars these bruins. You’ll gain the same market reach by stencilling “Pepsi” on the flank of a polar bear as you would if you tattooed it onto Brad Pitt’s forehead.’

  ‘Pitt?’ The Team Leader pouts. ‘Depp maybe. No way Pitt.’

  Tommy John ignores him. ‘And these honeys aren’t going to devalue the brand by cheating on Angelina or snorting crack, which, like, potentially Brad could. Or headlining a stinker like Troy, which he most def did. Strictly monogamous. Morals of a newly-converted Pentacostal. Pure as the driven …’ The Ideas Team is leaning toward this kid now, trying to read the brand name on the soles of his shoes.

  A sow will run to the point of heart-burst. You must swoop down on her and shoot her in her heaving hind-quarters before this happens or before she reaches water. Jam a dart of Lozetil into her arse and watch her wobble and flop in the snow. A boar will rise on his hind legs and slash at the chopper, never having known to run from anything. He will look sleek with his whiskers flattened in the downdraft of the rotor blades. Hit him in the shoulder using twice the dosage.

  Everyone waits on board until the bear has been pronounced out-of-it by the vet, who majored in Arctic Fauna at Vancouver University. He stands over the bear doing a ten-count like he’s a boxing referee. When he yells, ‘You’rrre out,’ and makes a slicing motion with his hand, it is safe for the airbrush artists to alight from the chopper with their compressors and airbrushes and stencils and begin painting this bear, so it can start paying its way.

  These airbrush artists have been recruited from custom-auto shops in Newark and have criminal records and tattoos that extend up their necks out of their parkas, making the Inuit frown. At first they found the bear a difficult canvas, being used to Coupe De Villes, Corvettes and Harleys. But with practice they have learnt to press the stencil into the bears’ pelt with a sideways motion that flattens the fur all in the one direction so it is sleek and tight. After that a polar bear isn’t such a different paint job to a Humvee.

  They are flown around the Arctic Circle, dropping from
the sky and prettying up bears until three thousand, two-hundred and thirty-one of them carry the brand on each flank. When the bears are painted the artists are dumped back in Newark with raccoon eyes and buckets of cash and wild tales of eating caribou and seeing the Northern Lights.

  Oh, yes. Mansey Brothers AdInfinitum have unearthed a major new star. Pepsi sales rise seven per cent in advanced countries with a penchant for wildlife documentaries. This is a goldrush. The Team Leader of the Ideas Team rings Tommy John and offers him a job. ‘Key-position player on the Team,’ he says. ‘Three-fifty a year. Why piss your life away at university?’

  ‘I wish you could see what my eyebrows are doing right now, dude,’ Tommy John says. ‘Like, they’re telling you (and he squeaks this part as if it’s his eyebrows talking), “Don’t even bother, dude.”’

  Tommy John, with the Pepsi bears going gangbusters, has re-evaluated his worth.

  The Pepsi bears might be going gangbusters as marketing tools, but in their everyday hustle and bustle as top-order predators they’ve had a design flaw inflicted upon them. Polar bears live almost exclusively on a diet of seals. And to catch a seal they need to creep up on it, which isn’t so hard when you are white in a white world. But to sneak up on a seal when you’re wearing a Pepsi logo the size of a bath towel on each flank … you might as well be dressed as a rodeo clown and wearing a leper bell around your neck.

  The bears begin to starve. Confused by the sudden perspicacity of seals they begin to drift south in search of new, stupider food. Bears are seen where bears have never been seen. Gaudy Pepsi bears can be witnessed staggering along Canadian back roads looking for food. Bright as parrots in their blue, white and red pop-drink logo against the greens and browns of the forest, they can bring down neither moose nor elk. They drift further south, burning their last reserves of energy, reminiscing over their former invisibility.

  And then it comes. What had to come, if you grant the bear the cognitive power to have adapted to his new appearance. If you are one of those who say the bear was wise enough to have snuck into that Pepsi-sponsored event and camouflaged himself there, waiting for prey. Others say it was coincidence; that there are so many Pepsi advertisements around it was only a matter of time before a Pepsi bear, famished and weak, slumped against a hoarding and … blended in. Disappeared.

  There is video footage taken by a parent before the attack in which, if you look hard, you can make out the bear; an unfocused Pepsi logo with a black nose on the far side of a hockey rink surrounded by an endless Pepsi hoarding. But you have to look hard. It is one Pepsi ad laid up against another. It is a camouflage worthy of evolution.

  It was an under-twelves ice hockey game in Edmonton. Deep into the last quarter he leapt out of the Pepsi hoarding like he would have done out of the white of the North when polar bears were white as the North. Play was up the far end and the goalie hunkered alone with his arse to the net. The bear took him from behind through the net with a delighted yelp. In strict adherence to Canada’s bilingual policy on public announcements, the goalie let out a cry of ‘No’ and a cry of ‘Non’.

  When the bear got to eating the goalie it was a thing to see. No preamble. No preparation. He shredded the net and shucked that boy from his hockey gear with mannerless haste and turned the ice red in his banquet while referees scaled the glass and mothers screamed and covered their little ones’ eyes.

  After the bear had eaten his fill of goaltender he lay back against the Pepsi hoarding and drifted off to sleep. Blended in so well that when the Mounties arrived they couldn’t get a positive ID on him and thus raked the hoarding end-to-end with a fusillade that must surely include and defeat him.

  The result of the game was called null-and-void, though the eaten kid had already let twelve goals slide past him and his team was consequently down by that margin. The parents of the other team had to bite their lips on this disappointment, and mostly did, though one father posted an anonymous e-mail on the league website that said: Like, commiserations and all … but twelve-zip? Five-zip I could understand, but this kid was leaking like the Titanic. It’s just a shame for our boys, is all.

  Everyone said it was a shame about the goalie, too. Eaten. Entirely unexpected and premature end to a life. But once everyone got through saying it was a shame, they said it was a form of justice. The media darkened the story to read like a morality play. A Greek Tragedy. Nature, finally at the end of her tether, rising up in righteous anger at Man!! in his destructive hubris. But it wasn’t anything that grand. It was a bear, for God-sakes. With an empty belly. And it was a boy in knee pads and a face mask. The Greeks were a semi-educated people. They were too classy to call it divine retribution when a bear trounced and digested a boy at his Saturday recreation.

  Footage of the attack made its way onto YouTube and with this one-sided telling of a Pepsi bear’s habits, he naturally took on a demonic hue. He became, in the eyes of the world, the most pitiless and relentless beast nature and commerce had yet devised. Canadian ranchers shot them from a thousand metres with sniper rifles. Coca-Cola organised bonding weekends where teams of executives hunted them from Chinooks with M60s, snarling, ‘Get some, asshole,’ beneath the chatter of the machine gun. The remaining Pepsi bears were forced back north, where they were tricolour fancypants in a white world and the seals floated on their backs waving their flippers at them joyfully.

  It was a major black eye for Pepsi. The bear had done the shameful thing Tommy John (admittedly a young man, still at school) had said he could never do. Tommy John said a polar bear wouldn’t cheat on Angelina Jolie or star in a stinker like Troy. And here it was he’d eaten an under-twelve in the end zone, which was the very Jolie/Troy event he promised bears were proof against. It was worse. The goalie was an only child and had had a miracle twenty-five-hour heart operation to save his life just the year before. Brad Pitt might as well have got himself endorsed by Pepsi then come out of the closet as a raving lunatic with a carnal partiality for warthogs.

  Pepsi felt the backlash from everyone but the stoned few who saw fun and mystery in the event. Greenpeace said Pepsi had painted up one of nature’s wonders like a crack-addled whore. And what could you expect from a crack-addled whore but to eat an under-twelve goalie? The hockey leagues, which were trying to promote hockey as a safe sport in the face of soccer’s rise, washed their hands of Pepsi. And parents everywhere who, with this sort of bullshit going on, half suspected an elephant might stampede out of a Subaru billboard and squash their darlings, made their silent protest by swapping brands. On the Discovery channel when a polar bear hove into view they took to pixilating its logo.

  Tommy John wasn’t boastful beyond the normal parameters of American youth and had gone no further than to shout his involvement in the Pepsi bears campaign from the rooftops and websites and several nationally syndicated New York based TV talk shows. He had become an overnight wunderkind and a big shot in Café Veg at Columbia University, where his feet could be seen kicked up on the tabletops for the undergrads to read his sneaker brand. He got a sapphire stud in his nose and forgot he had stolen the Pepsi bear idea from his half novel about Nike bears, forgotten the idea of a stencilled wild animal was ironic and supposed to illuminate the merciless, rapacious nature of Man!! He accepted the accolades and juggled the offers. He took to waggling his eyebrows in contempt at his American Lit lecturers as they spoke of Poe and Whitman.

  Then the kid was eaten and it took about half a day for the world to reason that Tommy John had virtually put out a contract on him. Ruined the bear and ruined the boy. To sell a pop drink. What kind of man would corrupt a species and murder a lad to sell soda pop?

  Tommy John became infamous overnight. Himself a talisman for the rapacious nature of Man!! At university a first-year student of Female Studies got herself some vigilante status by setting his hair alight in Café Veg at lunchtime. She glided up behind him and held a Bic lighter to his frizz and it flared and crackled while he leapt around screaming, ‘Fire!! Like �
� fire,’ and flapping at it with his hands. It went out of its own accord, leaving one side of his fro looking as if it had been stove in by vandals. Tommy John stood hunched ready to spring, staring through grit teeth at the Female Studies vigilante with his head smouldering. She was not abashed. She shouted, ‘I did that for the bear. The bear … Not the boy.’ Vegetarians cheered and clapped.

  The sound of vegetarians in tumult took the fight out of Tommy John. He rose out of his crouch and laid his splayed hands on his cheeks. If vegetarians were applauding him in flames then love was going to be hard to find. Maybe he needed a bodyguard.

  Still, Tommy John is not defeated. He knows enough of history to know it is as easy to change as a lie is to tell. He gets proactive with the spin. He rings the internationally syndicated Andrew Fifferman Hour and offers himself as a guest. Then rings Oprah and offers himself to her, before getting Jay Leno on the line. He starts a bidding war between them. And it’s fierce, because right at this moment he’s a big name. Right at this moment Tommy John is a dude pushing Bin Laden to the number two slot on Worst Person in History polls. A glittering, star-quality scumbag. Fifferman’s people win the bidding war and are over the moon.

  As Tommy John walks on set the audience begins to jeer and boo because employees of the show are holding up signs saying JEER AND BOO off camera. ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ Fifferman warns the audience through white teeth. ‘Hey, now. Hey, people, give the kid a break, he’s been brave enough to come in here today.’ If anyone is going to butcher this little freak it is Fifferman himself.

  They sit. They sip. They shake and small-talk before Fifferman’s first joke. ‘Tommy, I just took a call from Spielberg. He heard you were on the show. He wants to hire you, dude. Says Nazis have lost their mojo and he wants to know if you’re free to star as the asshole in his next Indiana Jones movie.’