Breeding Contempt - first rewrite.
Yeah okay, I tore myself away from GarageBand to get on with some 'real' work. I rewrote my first chapter (or section as they now will be referred to). I've tried to switch it up a bit so action is still happening throughout the description. It's not pacey but I hope I have given enough intrigue here that it speaks to what is going to happen.
“Hey mate.”
“Woah – what happened to you?”
“Yeah, it looks worse than it is. Can I help you?”
“Do you have three point five inch cables?”
“You need it for your car?”
I walked over to the fixture on which we hung those little blister packs. He followed.
“No, actually, I already have one in the—”
“You got three different lengths,” I explained, “from one point five metres, three metres and then five metres. Sometimes it’s good to get the longer one for the car, you know, if you want to pass the iPod around. I’m guessing it’s for an iPod.”
“Yeah mate, I already have one in the car. We just want to connect it to the stereo in the lounge.”
He scrutinised the cable’s packaging, reading the instructions printed on the back. His mouth moved absently as he read.
He wore a striped polo shirt, two sizes too big for him, yellow and blue. Plaid shorts made for the generation after his and thongs on his feet. His hair was thick, light brown, turning grey, combed to one side. I could tell the sides were usually kept short, but the edges were moving over his ears now. He had little grey eyes that to its features.
Dad on holiday? Or dad out of work?
“I think this’ll do,” he said finally.
“It will. I mean, you’ll be able to hear your iPod through your stereo.”
“Well. You can do better. If audio quality isn’t too important – if you just want to hear the songs, then that’s fine.”
He looked at me blankly, then at the cable in his hand.
“What I mean,” I was walking and again he followed, “is there’s a difference between hearing and listening. You agree? There’s a difference between a song – and music.”
I stopped in front of a shiny black device that looked like an enemy spaceship from a Michael Bay film.
“This,” I pointed at the unit, “will let you listen to music.”
“You look like you enjoy your music,” I paused, looked him in the eye. “Led Zeppelin?”
He laughed and nodded, “Yeah mate.”
I laughed along, shot him a wink as I pulled my little silver iPod from my pocket. He still had the cable, nursing it with both hands in front of his stomach. The opening drumbeat of When The Levee Breaks echoed across the store. The girls at the registers, the bumbling customers turned their heads. Phil smiled a closed-mouth smile, looking down, listening carefully. Serious and concentrated, he exhaled as the slide guitar writhed out of the speakers.
Before Plant started singing, Phil lifted his head. I turned the giant silver dial that sat above the iPod counter-clockwise so I could hear him.
“But we’ve already got a stereo.”
He tapped his foot, fiddled with the packet in his hands.
“I get that. The thing is though – you’re going to go home and just plug that cable into the headphone socket on your iPod. So, you’ve got Zeppelin,” I thought for a second, “or The Who or – Joni – these amazing musicians – amazing songs – travelling through what, one point five metres of cable into a machine that wasn’t even made for what you’re using it for.”
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home.
“Yeah, but for three bucks—”
“Let me ask you this – uh?”
“Phil.” I put my hand out and he took it, “Sam. Owens. Sam Owens. Let me ask you, Phil. Can you really put a price on art? Listen to that voice. What is that worth?”
“Exactly. This – the Pure-Fi Ultimate Bass X – this has all your EQ settings and – uh – codec – software that you need to turn your digital music files into real music. You’re not relying on some flimsy cord – you’re using the actual iPod connection, like you’re supposed to. It’ll be just like listening to your old records. Better.”
He was looking down again, still listening.
Cryin won’t help you, prayin won’t do you no good.
“You got your bass controls on the top here,” I turned the dial the other way again, so I had to yell. “Why don’t you play around, see just how good you can make Plant sound?”
He put the cable down on the shelf next to us and starting pressing buttons with plus and minus symbols printed on them, lighting up the stylish LED display, running through the different presets. I stood behind him, nodding in time with the music. I picked up the cable. Eventually, Phil turned that big silver dial back down again. The song still had three minutes to go. He turned, I smiled.
“Sounds great,” he said again, “but what is it – three hundred bucks?”
“I can’t afford that mate.”
“Well – I mean, if you really enjoyed it – I don’t want you to deprive yourself of that joy over something silly like price.”
Phil followed me over to my counter where I punched the keyboard and brought the computer monitor to life. I silently shoved the cable underneath the desk. I punched a couple more of the keys, looking intently, thoughtfully at the screen, while he looked at me. Working for him. Doing him a favour.
“Look. My manager isn’t on today. So, I’m going to say I could do that guy,” I pointed to the Pure-Fi Ultimate Bass X, “for two ninety. If you want it today.”
He bit his lower lip. You could still hear the faint drumbeat emanating from the speakers.
Two ninety meant that I still got a $10 commission from this sale alone, and he thought I was risking my job, or at least a Stern Talking To, by doing him this gracious $40 favour.
With the big green box set upon the counter, I punched more keys while he stood on the other side of the monitor, Visa card in hand.
“My wife is going to kill me.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that Phil. Once she hears her Rod Stewart MP3s through this bad boy, I bet she’ll be thanking you.”
“Now, have I mentioned our extended warranties?”
That’s about as personal as it got for me those days, even as Shannon laid naked beside me, dozing off in a narcotic haze. My parting words with the man who’d just been upsold by $300, the mother who’d been forced to buy both daughters new iPods in very specific colours, the gamer kid from the fast food joint upstairs who couldn’t wait to get his oil-slick-shimmering fingers on the latest surround sound speakers for his super-computer – they were the most intimate part of my day.
Shannon laid on her front and hair spilled over her face. Her back was pale and little red spots pocked the span of her shoulder blades. I’d been privilege to this view once before, in her room, just three days earlier. Sunday. Her room was cleaner, a small section of an enormous suburban temple. Gerard Butler in 300 had looked down on us from her walls, along with Dave Grohl and Ryan Gosling. The men whom she imagined were fucking her instead of men like me. Her parents were on holidays, she had said. She’d never been with a drug dealer, she had said.
“I’m not a drug dealer,” I had said.
Wednesday, my room was in a state of confusion as to whether I was just moving in or preparing to move out, and it had looked like this for close to six months. The illusion of transience when in fact I had stagnated.
I looked out the window. It had started to rain half-heartedly. ‘Rain’ was generous – it was more of a non-committal dripping. It was still hot, and now it was also damp. The discomfort seemed a suitable end to the day.
I’d started work at 8:30 that morning, my first day back after the weekend. To be precise, I had walked through the door at 8:34.
The store was an expanse of bright, primary colours fitted against a concrete floor and plain white walls. The far wall was completely barricaded with a black sheen of television screens that faced the entrance. Aisles of CDs, DVDs, BluRays and games for at least six different platforms occupied the entire eastern side of the store. The other half of the floor space was taken up by big-ticket items like hi-fi systems and $1000 speakers, DVD players and recorders (seen as ‘add-ons’ for the TV guys), personal computers and printers, and then ‘miscellaneous’. Miscellaneous was my section. It included about 38 different models of digital cameras, roughly the same amount of iPod-docking speakers, 15 different miniature hifi systems, an entire range of GPS navigation units and myriad portable MP3 players, sparkling in their glass cabinets.
It wasn’t much more than a landfill – a Temple of the Short Attention Span, an Altar of Temporarity. My role, literally, was to peddle all of this useless shit – to exact the death blows of the television commercials and Internet ads. In order to do this, I researched endlessly every minute detail of every pointless item we stocked. Every feature, every benefit was finite, explainable, sellable – however my knowledge of these expendable objects that got replaced monthly was without bounds.
Mine was an innate skill. The commissions motivated me, sure, but I found the job altogether too easy. Where it was a Temple or an Altar to the customers, to the staff it was a Monolith of Complacency. Most of my colleagues seemed to suffer the same daily existential crisis as I did – disgruntled and frustrated but unwilling to change a thing.
If our capitalist society governs all, and retail is the moving force behind that. It is the industry that founds what we know as ‘normal’, what we understand as our comfort zone. This makes my colleagues and me no more than cogs – of no concern and no understanding to anyone. We are the invisible, yet integral components of the machine that has defined our world to the extent that it is now invisible itself.
How can we help you today?
I had lied. My manager was working on that Wednesday. James Tanning. Not altogether unintelligent, yet completely unmotivated as far as career goes. He’d spent enough time in the company to climb the few rungs to his current position. After at least five years (and I’m certain it’s been longer in his case) working in a relatively high position within in this uninspiring and unthankful industry, he’s developed megalomaniacal and vaguely autocratic sentiments. His entire world exists within this shop, and he is in charge. In other words, he is a retail manager, and always will be.
He wore his hair short but always waited too long to get haircuts. He had bleached tips and would aimlessly cover his hair with $5 gel as if that’s what constituted ‘styling’. Facial hair would come and go – either a dark brown nineties goatee in defiance of his bleached tips, or nothing at all. I could never place his age – his pale, Anglo face suggested anywhere between early thirties to early forties, depending on the angle. He exclusively wore boot-cut jeans and long-sleeved shirts with vertical stripes.
James would leave little photocopied lists at each of the main areas in the shop. These lists would have tasks arranged by area and highlighted according to a colour code. This morning, the Miscellaneous tasks were an electric pink. I tried to read but my head pounded and my eyes couldn’t focus. The skin on the left side of my face was pulled tight over the swollen tissue beneath and I could feel the open cut had started to scab over. I gave up on reading the task list and walked up to one of the GPS units affixed to the wall. I stared into the tiny dead screen to see my reflection. The bruise was deep purple at its darkest, fading out towards the edges to a blush-red colour. It reflected the shine from the fluorescent lights overhead. It was a bold crescent around my left eye socket, blossoming out at the bottom over my cheekbone. The scab sat against the bone – more of a graze than a cut, I thought.
It was hard to discern between the pain caused by the injury and the pain I was feeling as a by-product of the chemicals I’d ingested over the weekend just passed. The nausea was the drugs, but I was pretty sure I was done with the vomiting.
I turned around, too fast. He had startled me.
“What are you doing, mate?”
“I was. I got your list,” I walked back past him to the counter.
“Mate, it’s nearly quarter-to. I need you to sort out your area before we open.”
“Uh. No, it looks. I think they mopped yesterday?”
He looked past me and sucked in his cheeks. The goatee was gone again, but its shadow lingered.
He sighed, “Well it’s too late now. Just tidy these shelves up. I’ll need you to restock them today.”
He walked off. As he reached the other side of the store – TVs – his demeanour shifted completely. I watched him laugh and joke with the TV guys, the macho ones with the collars popped on their polo shirts and their tribal armband tattoos peeking out from their short sleeves. That’s where the money was.
My head was flooded with noise – the static of customers, the static of perfectly constructed pop-songs blaring through the overhead speakers.
“What happened to your eye?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, how can I help?”
“I’m looking for the Walkmen.”
“Well – they don’t make Walkmans anymore. But we do stock a wide range of MP3 players.”
Despite the jarring pains inside my skull and the aching pains on its surface, as well as the queasiness swaying back and forth in my guts, the morning progressed without event, and I was grateful.
At 12:30, she walked through the doors and my heart sank.
