These particular outskirts of the city hang like a post-apocalyptic dress on the post-industrial hanger of a more affluent town centre. The threaded pavements are decorated with constellations of incisorsed gum, abandoned cars, red dust crisp packets, mauled receipts and a carwash for persistent motor vehicles which claims to give your car an EXPERIENCE OF A LIFETIME. Unfortunately, by the time you get to an enormous motorway bridge that serves as the gates to the city, your car is so re-polluted it’s time to return to the BEST CARWASH IN THE WORLD, for the second time in one short existence. To enter, one must bribe a simmering 5ft 7 man with a small lined face who lives inside the graffiti with an array of recycled dog food cans in order to meet the city’s newly imposed Eco Quota.
Small delipidated storefronts flutter at eye level. The business all have names like SMOOTH BOYz DELI, MR BARBER and GULMRAG’S SANDWICHES. I thought about what would happen when a giant claw came to mould them into a conglomerate called MR SMOOTH BARBER SANDWICHES; language is always entangling.
One Superdupermarket stands alone at the edge of the road, with a protruding neon sheen like an overbearing parent to all the little shops, promising to help you out if you only came home more than once a year. Owned by BlackRock, an evil gas giant, this store promises you bots so sinister you wondered what you had done on a different galaxy to be so aggressively screeched at. Without fail I put the bagging in the packing area, the packing area in my pocket and the receipt in my mouth. When the woman in the screen asks if I want to round my purchase to the nearest pound, increase my £73.30 to £800 for a BlackRock Selected Good Cause, I picture my Nonno waking at five every morning and returning at 9pm to eat the same dinner he ate every single night. The ingredients I am buying to make the peasant meal from my family’s hometown now cost more than any money my ancestors would have seen in their lifetimes. Whenever I left my Nonno’s house he would look me straight in the eye saying, in bocca al lupo like an incantation: in the mouth of the wolf.
The BAG FOREVER AND EVER AMEN begins to swallow me whole, beeping and flashing and asking me if I have paid for the micro-plastic taste all the way down. BigCorpo shops like this avoid paying tax through these altruistic schemes, claiming charitable expenses when you give them seventy extra p. for things like your £4 cliquecard price toothpaste. I put my fist through the screen.
Through the shards in my knuckles, you can just about make out the face of BlackRock Selected Advertisement Child, who has been paid and photographed in a wistful orange light. The good in this place is always captured in that fickle golden hour where the ugliness of our sins is briefly commodifiable. When I leave, I say thank you back to the machine. I am very much in the mouth of the wolf now.
THE SMALL MOUTH OF A WOLF: A Tiny Business Inquiry
I curse the universe slowly, until I realise I am now spitting on the sandy ground and screeching: WHY WHY WHY!!!!!!! IS MY PARENTAL LINEAGE NOT IN A HIGHER TAX BRACKET!!!!! My tear marks cause a chemical reaction when mixed with the toxic waste in front of me. Fortunately, none of the rats, their little scrunchy faces chewing through the barbed wire fence of SMOOTH BOYz DELIS, storefront seem to notice. The BOYz, at present, don’t appear to give a rat’s gluttonous hole either.
I raise my fists to the air catching small dust tornadoes between my fingers as I assess the real issue at hand. It’s just this:
Because my father’s salary is not 100k a year, he cannot give me the essential cash flow needed to fund what I know would be my successful start-up men’s clothing business where I sell medium quality black T-shirts with a small inoffensive logo on the front— one like they have on cans of offensive tasting craft beer. Perhaps a small grey star wearing a cap and clicking his fingers or something of this nature. The brand would have a similarly innocuous name like THESMALLFACESTM company.
The T-shirts would cost £85 pounds each and I would get a range of handsome, mullet sporting men, all called Theo, to repost them into the ether with the caption: RUNNING OUT OF THESE LIMITED EDITION REALLY NICE TOPS [my large budget would allow for an interweb marketer to fix this] I would, of course, have only sold a maximum of three T-shirts at this stage all of them have been purchased by the Theo’s as part of a Strategic Brand Deal with their BigCorpo balding managers.
The t-shirts would, of course, blow up BIG TIME when a loud mouthed TokTiker with a tiny microphone harangues one of the Theo’s in a cosmetic street in the heart of the ECO CITY, screaming at him in thunderous decibels: SO TELL US WHAT ARE YOU WEARING? Theo, who is wearing gifted knock off OxygenPods that allow for criminal levels of noise exposure from his last menial brand deal, will accidentally answer the question with Oh I’m listening to Iced Being Stirred in a Bowl of Water. The video would then cut to Theo walking away, stupidly slowly, but exhibiting the star cap logo on the back of his T-shirt long enough for the algorithm to pick it up. Because this is such an incorrect response from a stupidly handsome man with an ear piercing, who looks vaguely like a slightly more famous E-List celebrity, the video blows up and business booms. I would have a perpetual tan and smile knowingly at my customers calling them all FRIEND, THANKS FRIEND, WOULD YOU LIKE AN ETHICALLY SOURCED BAG WITH THAT FRIEND, as if I was always aware that I was made to be a Creative Director [something I am now outwardly referring to myself as on dating apps] since I wore those Jo*les dungarees at our holiday home in the Côte d’Azur and the cleaner noted, Wasn’t I just a little heartbreaker.
The T-shirts would be made in a sweatshop that my part-time assistant, full-time brother in arms, Greg from the gym, would deem ethical-ish. Once I made enough income for a pop-up shop in Camden, I would give some of it to good old Nonno exemplifying that I am both gracious and a philanthropic God who pays homage to his roots, a small percentage to a BlackRock Endorsed Dog Charity which helps middle class people cross the road and blow the rest of it in one night at a high-end casino masquerading as a gentlemen’s club. A place where they bring you your drinks for free because they have your credit card behind the bar. ONE MASSIVE FUCKING WEEKEND WITH THE BOYS EH. I would inexplicably chant things like ENGLAND ENGLAND in a London-ish accent. This will be okay because Greg has just been dumped by his wellness influencer girlfriend Cunty Rachel–who has decided she actually prefers his cousin Enterprise Ethan–and needed a laugh. After this night I will never ask Greg about Cunty Rachel again. Bar when the company is trickled into liquidation: we would all blame Cunty Rachel. Fuck you, Rachel. Dad would bail me out, put me on the naughty seat, NO MORE MONEY TO TRAVEL TO THAILAND FOR YOU!!!! This is until I convince him there has never been a better time to start an Artisanal Coffee Arts Hybrid Sports Gym Bar called EXPRESSBROS. Greg and I would prefer the Columbian blend.