Meelod at the Mall

 Meelod turned out to be Omar’s cousin.  He greeted me cheerfully—too cheerfully for the mall at 9 a.m., some might say—and that was pretty much the high point of our relationship.

“Welcome friend!” he bellowed, bowing and then clasping my one hand with his two, pumping it vigorously.  The bangles and chains around his wrist jingled and jangled, and the dark tufts of his arm hair poked out from underneath his shirt cuffs like hay from a busted scarecrow.  “We have been blessed with a beautiful morning for merchandising, yes?”  Oh yes, I agreed, a beautiful morning indeed.  I couldn’t wait to enjoy it from the ground floor bowels of the shopping mall.  A lovely view we had, triangulated between the food court, the T-Mobile store, and Lids. 

Meelod proceeded to give me a tour of the kiosk, made a real show of it, considering it was the size of a handicap stall, a compact emporium of crap wedged onto crowded shelves and packed racks, shit stuffed into sparkling glass display cases.  He stopped at one of the cases and removed a jailer’s keyring from his pocket and searched for one.  After a minute or two, he found it and unlocked the case, removed an item, and held it up for me.  “This is one of the new arrivals,” he said.  “Imported just the other day.  See the fine metal, the quality engraving, yes?”  I squinted at it, and it appeared to be a Masonic ring of sorts, with the “G” bounded by the builder’s square and the compass, but I admit my knowledge on the subject is limited to Nicholas Cage and the National Treasure franchise and my dead, crazy Uncle Sketch—Christ, what a funeral service that was!  There were these two odd chaps who no one knew, they just sort of appeared out of nowhere, looking like they’d mistaken Uncle Sketch’s funeral for a Michael Jackson cosplay convention, with their short top hats, white gloves, and bedazzled and frilly apron things, but they obviously knew him, because they spent a whole lot of time droning on about how Brother Sketch had been recalled to eternal service by the “Supreme Architect,” and then there was the lighting and snuffing and the relighting and resnuffing of candles, and then they performed a little box step number, all rigid and robotic, like they’d only rehearsed it the once that morning and halfway at that, before ending the ritual by handing my cousin’s new girlfriend, the only woman sitting in the front row, some kind of folded napkin or whatever, mistaking her for Sketch’s wife, who, unbeknownst to them, had died over a decade ago.  Oh, it was grand, the look on her face!  All like, what the fuck am I supposed to do with this thing?  And watching the actual officiant check his watch about a dozen times, wondering when the shepherd’s crook would arrive from the wing and yank these loonies from the dais?  Fucking hell, what a service!  Anyway, I told Meelod, yes, how very interesting, my tone, though, not keeping secret that I found it all ridiculously uninteresting.  Yet he continued on.

“Many think the ‘G’ stands for George Washburn, your country’s first ruler, yes?  But I will tell you this, Mr. McDenton: it actually stands for ‘Geometry’ and ‘God’—or ‘Allah,’” he said, then quickly adding, “Subhanahu wa ta ala.”  

I nodded my head, and he must’ve taken this as my saying, yes, Meelod, keep going, this is all very fascinating, I want to listen to you talk more about this.  Emboldened by his misinterpretation, he tried out a joke of sorts.  Still holding up the ring, he said, “I’ve been telling Omar we need these with an ‘A’ instead of a ‘G,’ yes?  The ‘A’ for ‘Allah’?  Praise be unto Him.”

I breathed deeply and continued to nod along, remained mindful to keep my trap shut lest my tone fully betray the deadly disinterest I felt coursing through my veins like a neurotoxin, soon to engender an imminent and inescapable paralytic torpor.  More than once—in order to escape such condition before it could fully take hold and render me a braindead vegetable—have I erupted on a mostly well-meaning stranger, keen on filling my earholes with utter nonsense and trifling shit, and begged him to please, for the love of God (or Allah, SWT): piss off or shut the hell up!! (Which is why my dealing with the Dude a few months back—if you remember—is all the more deserving of praise.)  Anyway, like I said, I kept quiet, and Meelod, to his credit, finally sensed something in my demeanor, as he quickly abandoned his regurgitation of the Wikipedia page on Freemasonry, placing the $2 ring with the $55 price tag back into the case.  He locked it and then ushered me to another section of the kiosk, where he grabbed a small glass bottle from a shelf. 

“Here,” he said, taking my wrist and depressing the pump to spray a mist of an unknown substance. “Tell me, what do you think?”

Reluctantly, I gave my wrist a whiff, and Christ, it smelled like I’d just stuck my arm elbow-deep into a dead elephant’s asshole.  Which I guess I shouldn’t have told Meelod, but something about the rotten horror of the stench brought out the honesty in me.  Meelod, aghast, took a step back and shielded the bottle in a protective cradle.

“You dare insult my wares?” he growled.  “Do you know how many weeks it takes to collect enough secretions for a single vial?”

Woah, woah, back up Meelod.  Secretions?  What in the oozing bloody hell are you on about?  He began to explain, but I zoned out when he started talking about the musk pod of some animal and having to deep fry it in hot oil.

Well, the rest of the morning passed by uneventfully.  Meelod harassed a few passersby, but they were all seasoned mall-goers who avoided eye contact and never broke stride.  When twelve o’clock hit, I asked Meelod about the kiosk’s policy on lunch breaks.  He unclasped his briefcase and removed a small Ziploc bag of grape tomatoes and said that someone always had to be at the kiosk, that it was to remain open for business until the mall closed—“This is a numbers game, Mr. McDonald; every minute the kiosk is left unmanned is two dozen customers lost.”—ah yes, stupid me, of course, the crowd that’s absolutely mad for that canine anal glands essential oil spray of yours will certainly hit at the lunch hour, that’s the reason behind the fuck all customers we’ve had the entire morning, right?  Meelod seemed fairly content with his bag of tomatoes, but I figured I’d see if he wanted anything else, some protein perhaps.  I planned to hit up the hotdog vendor who parked his cart on the north side of the lot, so I asked if he fancied a wiener.  This, too, was a misstep.

“Again you must insult me, Mr. McDelmont?!” he roared.  “And on the final week of Ramadan, no less?  Give me strength, Allah, may He be praised and exalted!”

I tried to apologize, tried to assure him that I had no intention of offending him, his culture, his religion, that I was a religious man myself, albeit an ignorant and foolish one—that every Lenten season it was a battle to abstain from eating (really to remember to abstain from eating) meat on Fridays and to instead take advantage of the plethora of delicious offerings available to me, e.g., the Filet-O-Fish or the Big Fish— but Meelod was having none of it. 

“You dare defile the sanctity of my and my brother’s kiosk with tubes of pig asshole, do you?”

This, believe it or not, started a rather interesting debate on the subjects of hotdogs, semantics, and oxymorons.  See, Meelod, now this is a conversation I can get behind!  Like, yes, I admit, hotdogs aren’t the most appetizing of foods, but are they really just encased hog butthole?  I mean, think about it, a hole is the absence of something—a hole in the ground is the absence of dirt, a black hole the absence of light, an asshole the absence of ass—so how can you fill something with nothing?  Now, the hooves, the eyeballs, the testicles, the snouts?  Sure, grind that matter, tube it up, and take my ass out to the ballpark!  Relatively assuaged, though apparently exhausted from this discussion, Meelod sighed and tossed a tomato into his mouth, bursting it with a wet pop.  He tossed in another, and then another, and then a couple more—take it easy, Meelod!—scrunching his face as he chewed, deep in thought, and then—surprise!—he told me I could take the rest of the day off.  At least that’s what I think he’d said.  I couldn’t really hear him because I was too busy marveling at his open-mawed mastication, the flashes of red flesh, the trickle of juices leaking from the corners of his mouth.  Anyway, he dismissed me with a wave, and, as planned, I went and rewarded myself with a celebratory wiener in commemoration of day one of gainful employment, the first of many!