Limited Edition Job

I had been tipped off in advance that Dave wanted to see me. A cross between David Koresh and David Ike dressed from head to toe in Japanese street wear brands, Dave was the owner of the trendy clothes shop I worked in. Someone had told him that I was selling the limited edition Nike trainers the shop sold, on eBay for ten times their recommended retail price. I’m ashamed to say, this is all true, but in my defence I had paid for every pair I sold. Surely then, I mentally rehearsed, it was my business if I wore them or gave them away or sold them for a vast profit or loss. What if I held on to them and gave them to my children who then sold them as antiques after I had died? Would that be so different? But like I said, I wasn’t supposed to know any of this, so when Dave’s PA phoned to ask if I would come into his office for a meeting I cheerfully agreed.

Like so many jobs, working in a trendy clothes shop was only meant to be a stopgap thing whilst I tried to find my feet again. After free falling for most of my twenties, the routine the job offered had come as a welcome relief. I saw it as a chance to straighten myself out. At the time I had nearly finished writing a rambling first novel. Now I thought I would be able to find the time in my new boring life to pursue my writing more purposefully.

Seven years later I was still struggling to finish it. The longer I stayed in the shop, the more I became convinced that without the routine I would effortlessly slip into one of the many ruts I had once been stuck in. But the rut I was in now was bigger than any possible rut that I was trying to avoid.

At least I had something to say before. The longer I remained in the shop the less I seemed to have to write about. What could a middle-aged man working in a trendy clothes shop possibly have to say that’s remotely interesting? If you’re looking for life you’re more likely to find it in a morgue than in a trendy clothes shop. A post office or six years on the dole doing nothing but smack and watching Third Reich movies (thanks Tony Ogden R.I.P) but never in a trendy clothes shop. It’s dead end but it’s not so doomed that you can dress it up as poetic or romantic. Charles Bukowski would never have written a book called “Trendy Men’s Clothes Shop”. I was neither the struggling pianist playing for tips in a bar or the ballet dancer who works as an exotic entertainer to pay the bills. Even the same customers I pitied confided in me because they saw themselves when they saw me festering like a trendy zombie behind the counter.

Vice fiction issue, December 2008