Bottom of the retail food chain/roadkill people/smashing pumpkins tribute

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 19:05

For BJ wherever he is along that roadside

Its hard to put your faith even when you are an atheist into an American band but I did somewhat with this now defunct band the Smashing Pumpkins. I actually don’t like as much of their music as I should to be writing that. I certainly haven't listened to all their songs. I would like to though but I'm not going to go out and invest in their retirement by buying all their albums. They were a prolific band those Smashing Pumpkins. What do I know about them? Not much.

Their name is odd but it brings back memories of life in a nameless suburb for which America is now chock full of. Memories of the nineteen seventies before disco, when the cancers of strip mall-ing where still tolerable in most places, those Smashing Pumpkins brings back feelings of white aluminium sided tacky homes with hints of colonial architecture to them. Green Lawn chemical trucks on search and destroy missions against brown August lawns despite the water shortages, persistent heat wave and damage to the local water table. Parked neatly in front of these almost cardboard like homes large sleek American cars before they fell to the Trojan horse of the small seemingly affordable Japanese car that we always called death traps but didn’t know why. Back when the original VW Beetle still roamed the roads in all their oddity. When there was actually a manufacturer of cars called the AMC (American Motors Corp) who made a car called a Gremlin. I'd kill for one of those. Or a Pacer built for fat people or so we thought.... Back then the radio still hummed with the sounds of Jefferson Aeroplane/Starship with Grace Slick belting out rock anthems with an appealing devilish sound. They'll always be Jefferson Aeroplane to me because I once saw in this series of books, a 20th century retrospective, in the school library, on the sixties, with a particularly arty poster of them. And didn't like Grace Slick or Jefferson Starship start a record company with Grace's daughter or daughters father called Smashing Pumpkin Records. I wonder if they spawned this band that I don’t really know yet adore?

I do though remember working diligently in the autumn in late October on carving the perfect face in a brilliant orange orb of a pumpkin. And that its ridges and curves would always thwart my designs for its face and something altogether unwanted or unexpected would emerge from my hands stiffened by fighting with a dull carving knife to extract its face. A face it seemed the pumpkin tried to extract from me. All the while looming in the back of my mind was knowing that a bunch of teenager boys were going to roam the neighbourhood in a pack while I was out Trick-or-Treating searching for the lonely pumpkin younger children cherished to leave smashed on the pavement - smashing their sense of life in a endless nameless suburb. A feeling that would return again and again. And what exactly does this band with its sinister name have to do with Hallowe'en? This band who lost at least one member to the American denial of the need for safe recreational drugs or maybe that was just hearsay. I sorta wish I knew this band. Their first song I remember liking was 1979. I remember '79. The songs beautiful abstract melancholia allows me to fill in the blanks with a sense of my own memories from back then. Memories of my brother driving me to school in his old, permanently being restored, never got restored, Mercury Cougar. Listening to Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic (get this ON 8-TRACK!!!) in the mornings sitting in traffic while not talking to each other. Sitting in those brown vinyl bucket seats down low in the car next to my brother is the closest I ever got to him and it makes sense we didn’t talk.

I remember asking my co-worker Aaron to steal that new (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness) CD so we could just drive around in his mom’s Chevy Cavalier listening to it. Aaron my good friend always off being fabulous. He never did steal that CD for me though we stole others from our retail job. We never listened to it in his car as I wanted him to with me as he always had band practice everynite after work. I did steal Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness though. At first I had a hard time getting past the guitars. Aaron kept telling me they had other music like their video of antique science fiction with the “Man in the Moon” references. That old cinematic image still harping at my soul since i first saw it as a kid. That image is a part of my subconscious I swear as is their reproduction video of it with amazing beauty. The band ruled. To bad I got fired for stealing before I could have stolen other CDs of their music. I remember Aaron used to leave every nite with like ten CDs rattling on him in every pocket as we’d pass through the electronic checkpoint. That miserable checkpoint. I never used to steal from work before they had those. But then it was such an insult to me when they installed them and forced us to use them as customers that I felt it MANDATORY to steal from where I worked. Anything everyday. And it felt good. It made up for the miserable corporates who'd literally "come down" the corporate ladder like from some Metropolis above us where the sun shined to check up on us. Or from the miserable yuppy customers with their diet cappucinos and cheesecake breaks.

The same guys in ties and jackets and BMWs parked at odd angles outside who used to as kids SMASH MY PUMPKINS mercilessly not respecting the life that came to them with their burning candles inside at nite. Maybe that is why i couldn’t get a job after getting fired for stealing. And then when I did it was for five dollars and hour working from 8pm to 8am four consecutive nights a week at an all nite video store. Where at four in the morning guys would check out like eight hours worth of heteroanal videos due back within 24 hours. And I would think at least they'll be indoors and off the streets either watching their stuff or sleeping to it playing on their TVs VCR and this way the streets were safer. Not that I care about safe streets. But sitting alone in a video store on a nameless street at four in the morning I sorta gave it a thought then. Fearing the nite I saw a guy come in and come toward me to blow my brains out for the twenty in change in the cash drawer and all the videos he could carry. But I quit that job fearing he might get me there. Then i escaped to health food retail, from all nite videos, from seven days a week books, music, art and coffee, from a 24-7 photocopy shop all on the same vague multi-lane (the one without crosswalks) intersection near the hospital i was born at. In the Midwest. In Ohio. Alongside an eight-lane road with lights and miles of retail shopping pits. The only interesting places - the all nite ones and then only after midnite. How many strip malls can one endure? How many parking lots and various shops inside with their little enchantments? How many days on end showing up for work in hot weather, cold weather? Snow. Drought. Rain. Or astonishingly beautiful and heavy storms. When what was going on outside overhead made me feel alive and sensual like nothing else I knew: To give that moment up for a time clock commitment. which I was not surprisingly always late for.

So this is all like my life as the Smashing Pumpkins. Certain songs release these feelings somehow magically. Their song The Boy reminding me of my lover being new in my life. Reminding me of those feelings of being brought to life not by an amazing storm but by someone all too like myself. Or their images of blurry neon enhanced retail realities. Smirking at those around them. Knowing full well first hand the retail life people like us were born into to serve with all our being. So we could buy their music making their lives richer. So we could work our retail counters so their corporations would get richer while we barely made it by. Watching day after day from behind retail. Watching each day slide into a traffic lit sunset at the end of a too wide road flanked by tarred over horizon lines under bright advertising lites. where the heat waves broke the horizon line of an immense man made ugliness. At least no matter what side those Smashing Pumpkins are on in this retail hell equation their songs seem to speak of knowing this vast, vast endless retail trap. And though they occasionally to me communicate a glamour in those retail dregs its a welcome glamour when your stuck without any glamour. When you see wealth come up next to you and slip away without any concern for your well-being. When you see all the money and merchandize pass through your own hands for a pittance in pay to schlep it and you know your car won’t start after work at midnite and if it does, will it start to get you back at work by 8 am the next day. And does your company care they don’t pay you enough to navigate the roads and parking lots and neighbourhoods to get yourself to work. When they don’t care to provide health care. When there is no public transport that is worth its wait. Why go to work? When there is no welfare. When you are depressed with this lot and cannot move outta bed because the site of your car, the eight-lane roads, the heat or the cold, or the interminable parking lots is just not inspiration enough to inhale another auto exhaust breath of air. When the light above is dirty brown and the life below synthetic in most every way. This is when I feel like the rodent road kill destined life that emerges alongside certain roads near rivers and woods. Although I too drive the cars that kill and have killed road kill. Felt the car ride over a squealing victim. Felt tears over what I had done all while cows meat from a burger chain digested in my belly. While driving back to work to kiss the time clock to participate in meaningless retail realities. What is this America we've made? It couldn’t be uglier to look at or endure in its reality.

At least when I hear certain Smashing Pumpkin songs played at random on the radio I know someone somewhere has seen this Beast that has spread across the US devastating the lives of those trapped in it. Are they singing to wake up their listeners? Are they singing to keep them asleep? Are they singing because they too are trapped in these retail chains that were laid down for us before we were born? When I feel their music I don’t know. I do know they were one of the few roaming band of musicians in those days not too long ago who knew of this side of the retail realities of life deep within this Beast here in the Midwest. Along side state route 40 the old National road that crosses the nation. In places along it from where I’ve been there are many lanes. Many parking lots, chain linked fences, weeds, traffic lites. Retail hells with many victims trapped inside to their respective corporate whims. Neon lites. Flourescent lite. Sodium orange streetlights. Light pollution. in essence anything unnatural being the rule. Lives with machines who count the money for you with connection to electronic lines guaging other peoples realities. People coming and going and no one noticing you so that if or when some bright soul does it terrifies you and before you feel relief at a kind and unfamiliar face they’ve gone. This is why I don’t work. I can’t bring myself to it. Retail is nowhere you want to be at any time for any reason. It’s more dangerous than Heroin and much, much more addictive. whether you are stuck buying the Cds or stuck shelving and selling them (or stuck making them) it’s a dangerous addiction. And the scariest thing of all when you stand along side route 40 in Columbus, Ohio on a hot summer day and look east, then west its strip malls and parking lots flanking eight lanes of road to nowhere for as far as you can see or care to drive. I don’t know if it’s like that all the way to either side of the nation on that road. Fast food. Records. Books. Clothes. Gas. Car Repair. Mufflers. Autos. New and used. Thrift stores. Fry Pits. Neon. Fluorescence. Tarmac. And big, big sky that although omnipresent overhead no one much notices. Such a flat useless existance. I can’t shop. I can’t work. It’s all too traumatic. It may not be that way straight across the nation but there are enough deviations and cross streets continuing the retail monotony - hell we’re even exporting it to unwitting lands. It’s the cancer of planet Earth.

At least when I hear the Smashing Pumpkins sing I feel they have been there and seen this Beast for what it is. Maybe from their privileged position but they seem to sing of its abstract images with a sense of knowing. And if you’re stuck in it and its feels like death at least you know there is a song in there too and although maybe someone else is capitalising on that, its all you’ve got to hold onto when your there in that quagmire of banality in the Midwest of the US that spreads out in all directions.

Originally written as an email to BJ in Ohio from Belgium

Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 1999 00:00
Subject: bottom of the retail food chain/roadkill people/smashing pumpkins tribute
Revised Thursday August 28, 2003 18:38