The Town on the Border

It's Saturday and we've found ourselves at a loose end, so we drive to Laredo on a whim and because we haven't been there in a while. Laredo is on the northern bank of the Rio Grande, and Nuevo Laredo - which is actually in Mexico - is on the other side. We leave before noon, drive for an hour but not quite two and park in the usual parking lot on the bank of the river. We can see a Mexican family on the other side, spilling from their car for a picnic and a couple of the kids with fishing rods. The hysteria attendant to the thought of people on the other side of the border and what they might do seems even more strange and stupid when you can actually see them with your own eyes. The river isn't even so wide as the Thames as it passes through London and the water is warmer which probably explains a couple of border patrol vehicles parked nearby - just in case.

We stroll a few hundred yards along to the bridge where both vehicles and pedestrians cross to and from Mexico, passing through an enormous Border Control center on the opposite bank. There's a guy fishing beneath the bridge, stood in front of a squall of graffiti which is too far away to be legible. I take a photograph on my digital camera and zoom in to read Tepito existe porque resisto, which amounts to Tepito exists because it resists, or similar, although I have no idea what it means. Tepito is one of the reputedly more fearsome neighbourhoods of Mexico City, which is nevertheless seven hundred miles to the south. Maybe there's also a Tepito in Nuevo Laredo, or maybe the name has accumulated some other meaning. In any case, the slogan is surrounded by graffiti footnotes suggesting that the artist really, really likes someone called Rachel, so we probably have a mixed message even before we get to the language barrier.

Laredo itself seems unusually empty given that it's Saturday afternoon. The stores are open but there's hardly anyone around, and I wonder if the traditional Mexican siesta has finally crossed the border. It really does feel like I'm back in Mexico again. The stores are distinctly Mexican - notably all the perfume outlets and a branch of Liverpool, the department store - although I realise they may simply be trading on the name rather than actually related. We pass a branch of Church's, the fried chicken franchise, and because this is Laredo the usual corporate hoardings and illuminated menus are hand painted on a piece of hardboard. The town even smells like Mexico City, which is uncanny - which I qualify by stating that Mexico City smells simply distinctive rather than actively unpleasant, unless it's very early morning for some reason.

Passing a clothing store, I see that the floor is divided into sections for women, ladies, and accessories - marker pen on squares of cardboard. The distinction, so my wife informs me, is that clothes for ladies tend to be regular sizes, whereas those for women apparently presume that the customer could stand to lose a few pounds - which seems somewhat judgey.

We enter what resembles a thrift store because I decide I need to buy a belt. I've been trying to lose weight and have succeeded in so much as that my trousers now fall down with some frequency due to my having reached the final hole on my normal belt. Their belts are a dollar each, which seems just a little too cheap to be trusted. There's a stack of comic books at one side of the store, which is organised according to some free-range logic, and uppermost is a reprint of a specific issue of the Incredible Hulk that I've been after for two years. I haven't bought a copy because the cheapest I can find presently costs several hundred dollars, even in terrible condition, and online searches have yielded no reference to any cheaper reprint leaving me to assume that there was no such thing. Yet here it is for something like fifty cents; except, having been looking for the thing since about 2018 or thereabouts, just this week I paid twenty bucks for a paperback collection including this specific issue - amongst others which I had no particular interest in reading - and which arrived in the mail just yesterday morning.

We keep walking and begin to notice how many stores have been boarded up - pretty much all of them. The heart of Laredo has become a ghost town with just two or three functioning streets at the center. The rest has been abandoned, and even the occasional spray of broken glass seems to have been left untouched as it would be were it a crime scene, which somehow it isn't. There's no telling whether this is a direct result of the pandemic, or whether old Laredo was always on the economic edge. The outlet malls which line the highway on the way in and out of town seem to be doing business as usual, so it's anyone's guess.

We return to the car and head home, hoping the place will have been restored to life next time we visit.

City resources have apparently been stretched by an influx of refugees from Haiti, and there's the recent discovery of a huge mass grave just across the river, but I have no idea whether either of these are really a factor in whatever has happened to Laredo. It's a great shame because it's a lovely town, one where it's still possible to walk down a street without feeling like there's a massive invisible hand squeezing every last droplet of money out of you, without feeling like you're just part of a financial equation; or that's how it was. I fear for whatever the future may hold.

Fare Thee Well, Pentagon Center

My first true mall was the Stoneborough Center in Maidstone, Kent, prior to which I knew the mall only as a place where American teenagers would hang out in movies starring Michael J. Fox. I grew up in the era of the shopping precinct. By the time I went to art college, the era of the mall had arrived. The Stoneborough center had a great record shop called Challenger & Hicks from which I purchased debut albums by the Dentists and the Apostles, amongst others; and Hayley worked at Miss Selfridge on the lower floor. I had entered Hayley one evening, a transaction facilitated by booze and Hayley's desire to annoy Pete, her boyfriend, but it ended badly. This left me mooning around outside Miss Selfridge trying to make it seem as though I just happened to be passing, until she emerged, took me to McDonalds, and explained the general concept of dumpsville - which was probably fair enough with hindsight.

That's all I can remember of the Stoneborough Center.

My second mall was the Pentagon Center in Chatham, Kent. I moved to Chatham in September, 1987 and lived there for the next two years. The Pentagon Center was bigger and Chatham had better pubs and I knew more people. My memories of the Pentagon Center are as follows:

• Andy Bibby shoplifting my Christmas present from WHSmith, the Monkees greatest hits on cassette. He presented me with this gift directly outside the Pentagon Center on the pedestrian walkway. I wasn't actually expecting a Christmas present from him because I didn't like him very much, and was never particularly struck on the Monkees either for that matter.
• Buying cheap records from a store on the ground floor. The shop seemed to be one big bargain bin of ex-chart releases and things which hadn't sold in the first place. Being on the dole and hence skint at the time, I picked up quite a lot there and even got into the habit of buying 7" singles seeing as they were something like twenty-five pence each. I'd only really bothered with albums and 12" singles up until that point for slightly cranky, pedantic reasons; but at twenty-five pence a throw, I felt adventurous and took chances on things I'd never heard if they seemed interesting. Inevitably I picked up a few duds, but also some pretty good stuff - Eric B & Rakim, early techno singles by Todd Terry and the like.
• Buying normally priced records from K2, the other record store, which I think was on the second floor. They had a couple of things on the Illuminated label, which was nice, and the first Lack of Knowledge album. I also encountered my first Metallica album in their racks. I hadn't heard of them before, and thirty years later I'm still astonished at what a pitiful name they chose - Metallica because they play metal, and so it presumably suggests things which pertain to the same. It struck me as being like a punk band calling themselves the Gobbing Pogoers or Punkerrific!
• Running into the French chef from the Blue Lagoon just outside one afternoon and him getting very excited and waving a newspaper at me, folded to the classified section at the back. The prison service was recruiting. He knew I was on the dole and somehow thought I'd make a great prison warden. He might have been Spanish, come to think of it.
• The Blue Grotto, which was a depressing pub on the lower floor as you made your way out to where the National Express coaches were parked, and tellingly possibly the nearest pub to the dole office as the crow flies - although it might have been Churchill's, I suppose. It felt like one of those modern pubs on a fifties estate, all stains, man-made fibre and broken dreams. I'm not sure I ever went in there, or if I did, I didn't stay very long. Its claim to fame seems to have been as venue for the Dentists' first gig.
• Ludicrously animatronic festive displays around Christmas near the escalators, although this is one of those memories where I can no longer quite remember if it was from life or something on TV.
• Pilgrimage to the associated coach station every other Friday afternoon - either every two weeks or possibly monthly - for transport up to London so as to stock up on X-Men comics and visit my friend Carl in Rotherhithe. This coach journey is probably what imprinted me with the idea of living in Lewisham, which I eventually did. The most memorable part of the route was through Lewisham, you see.

That's more or less the sum of my memories of the Pentagon Centre, although there's also the possibility that I may have bought a Talking Heads album from WHSmith, probably Speaking in Tongues. They're not great memories, and you'd be hard pressed to get a three hour feature film out of them, but they're my memories.

Recently I've learned that the Pentagon Center is to be redeveloped. Online articles seem keen to stress that it's a redevelopment rather than demolition, but the first image that comes up shows a JCB, rubble, and hoarding promising 1 & 2 bedroom apartments from ₤185,000. I'm not sure I've set foot in the place this century, never mind recently, and I don't doubt the truth of online articles bemoaning it having turned into a piss-stained urban purgatory of pound shops and loan sharks; but then it was always kind of crappy, even in my day, and it felt like our crappy. I don't have any real investment in the place, not after all this time, and arguably even less right to object to the coffee crash pads and mindfulness hubs which I'm sure will soon be setting up shop in whatever's left once they've housed all those web developers from Leicester who've heard something or other about at least one of the local schools; but I thought I should at least acknowledge the passing of whatever it is that's passing.

Some things were better when they were crap.

Warehouse

San Antonio has a problem with homeless people. I don't know how many homeless people we have relative to other cities, but we have them and they're fairly visible. There was some law passed a couple of years ago whereby one could be fined or otherwise made subject to legal action should you be seen aiding a homeless, even just giving one a sandwich or a can of pop. I don't know if this law is still in place because I don't actively seek out information which might facilitate my expressing indignation on social media, but I haven't heard about it having been dropped; and I have heard about House Bill 1925 which criminalises homeless encampments and which was winging its way to the desk of Russ Abbott, our state governor, just a few months ago. Given Russ Abbott's previous Trumpesque form whereby the value of a decision is quantified by how much it will annoy liberals, I'm sure he'll think it's a wonderful idea.

The notion of discouraging homeless persons by fining those who provide food seemed calculated to diminish vagrancy around the more picturesque parts of the city centre where tourists with big wallets might happen to pass by. I seem to recall that, in official terms, the law was intended to concentrate all those bums and park tramps in the general vicinity of recognised homeless shelters and soup kitchens - mostly at some distance from the Alamo by happy coincidence. I have become unfortunately accustomed to persons who think in this way, persons such as the genius who posted on Next Door to announce that he would be standing for election and would appreciate our support. He'd noticed a lot of homelesses along Austin Highway and was going to solve the problem by taxing them. I guess if those lazy homelesses suddenly found a chunk of their wages being siphoned off by the city treasury, they might buck up their ideas and start living in houses. I don't really see the logic in this proposal but then I've never read Ayn Rand.

In related news, my stepson occasionally engages in volunteer work for a homeless charity. This is something to do with his school which expects so many hours of volunteer work from him each year, and which somehow counts towards his 'O' levels or whatever the hell it is happens at the end. He's volunteered at the local zoo, which I understand mostly involves him standing around and lecturing complete strangers on animal facts and statistics regardless of whether or not they asked. This seems to relate to the sort of thing he wants to do when he leaves school, and is more or less what he does anyway, so that's handy. He also spent some time volunteering at a retirement community, either calling out bingo numbers or providing hand massages with moisturiser, but he wasn't quite so keen on that one for some reason. The work for the homeless charity is usually either parcelling up boxes of food and the like, or else working in one of the kitchens at which the homeless get to eat without anyone being fined.

It probably comes as no surprise that his various volunteer jobs have been somewhat thin on the ground during the pandemic, but things seemed to be starting up again, and so my wife put him down for packing boxes as soon as it became an option. She also put herself down for a shift, and me too. I don't remember exactly why, but it seemed like something to do.

We were given a time and place at which we showed up along with about a hundred others, possibly more, and were all herded into a warehouse of the kind with which I am quite familiar, having worked in many similar places over the years. The biggest difference was not so much that the boxes we'd all be slugging around contained food as that those present actively wanted to be there, presumably having lived lives which had spared them from working a conveyor belt. We were mostly teenagers or suburban housewives with big smiles, clean clothes, and a can do attitude; as distinct from employees of Parcel Force, few of whom had any better options.

The deal was that we'd each pick a place along the conveyor belt. One group of people were given the task of assembling cardboard boxes and setting them on the belt. The rest of us worked in teams, opening up packages of bottled fruit juice, breakfast cereal, tinned food - whatever had been donated or otherwise procured - and filling the boxes. Bess, myself and the boy took up position right at the start of the belt. My job was to collect newly assembled boxes from the people behind me and set them on the belt. Junior opened up packages of apple juice and set each bottle on a trestle table, and Bess transferred a single bottle to each box before shoving it along so that the next people in line could add a carton of breakfast cereal, and so on and so on until the box was full by the time it reached the other end. It was boring and repetitive but it was good exercise - the sort of task which becomes automatic after the first few minutes. There were seven or eight people working behind me, all pulling flat boxes from a pack, pushing them out, taping up the bottom, and stacking them ready.

I did this for about an hour and came to the peculiar realisation that I kind of miss this sort of manual labour. There's something satisfying about its sheer relentless physicality, although it doubtless helped that no-one was going for maximum productivity by overloading the workforce to its absolute limit as they did at Parcel Force - a job which involved more yelling than any I've done before or since.

We had a ten minute break after about an hour, then got back to it for the second half. Junior began to struggle, having apparently been thrown by the arrival of a different brand of apple juice, the bottles of which could not be lifted from the packaging with quite the same fluid motion as before. I told him to take over what I'd been doing on the grounds that I have more experience as a mindlessly labouring cog in a machine so it didn't make much difference to me. The new bottles were indeed a pain in the arse compared to the previous type, but it was otherwise fine, and so we all chugged away for another hour. Metal things cracked and banged and echoed around the vast, cavernous space, and the radio cranked out distorted hits of the seventies and eighties. It was all strangely familiar, but less depressing for being a one off deal.

Neither Bess nor myself recall how many boxes we made up at the end of the two hours, but it seemed like a lot, and it felt as though we'd done something good. I have no idea how much difference any of it will have made to those who'll receive one of our boxes, but hopefully it will be a help on some level; and it at least seemed more productive than any of the endless whining about people who live out of borrowed shopping carts making the place look untidy.

Hello, My Name is Max Cady

I'm cooking dinner when my wife calls me into the front room. 'Can you believe this?'

I turn to the TV. We're tuned to the evening news, presently taken up by footage from someone's cellphone. Some woman has encountered Judge Nelson Wolff in a local supermarket and is giving him a piece of her mind, such as it is, whilst filming it all on her phone. Wolff walks to his car, refusing to acknowledge the woman as she calls him a communist and a traitor, adding that making a kid wear a mask is a form of child abuse. This is a woman who likes to stand up for what she believes in. She's shared this video clip on social media and now it's on the news.

Nelson Wolff is among those supporting Mayor Ron Nirenberg's opposition to our state governor's most recent decree, the one banning mask mandates. Our state governor believes that ordering people to wear masks during a pandemic - and presumably he understands that we're in the middle of a pandemic on some fucking level - is a violation of human rights or something. Our city council appears to believe that our state governor is a shithead and I can sort of see their point, if that's actually what they believe.

'Who the fuck does she think she is?' I ask.

'She's a hairdresser,' Bess tells me.

'Wow.'

We rewind the clip and watch it again, then I go back to the kitchen and Bess gets to work on her phone. Within minutes she's found the woman's home address, the hair salon, and everything else you would probably rather not know.

The woman's surname is obviously something she came up with herself. I won't repeat it here, but let's just say that as names go, she may as well have named herself Ashley Awesome or something similarly imaginative. It's the equivalent of a personalised license plate on your vehicle, letters and numbers somehow tailored so as to imply that you're a hit in the sack or whatever. If there's one surefire indication of life's success stories, it's that which is written on a personalised license plate because it's always the truth.

Ashley Awesome's facebook page is batshit - exactly the sort of thing you would expect of someone who calls an elected official - here in Texas in the year of Our Lord 2021 - a communist: Trump was clearing out the swamp, the pandemic has been orchestrated and anyway it's not that serious, blah blah blah freedom blah blah blah the constitution blah blah blah…

A couple of days later we happen to be out and about on a drive, and we just happen to drive past the woman's home. We want to see what it looks like. We want to be Robert deNiro taking his seat in front of Nick Nolte and lighting up the world's smelliest cigar. The house is in one of those bland personality free subdivisions which make English council estates seem wildly Bohemian. Every house is the same, few trees, no shops, no stores, nothing communal and everything just a little too clean; and these houses cost a shitload too, much more than our own rundown corner of the 'hood. This is where all those success stories end up. There's a dirt bike in the woman's drive, and the flag of the black and white stars and stripes bisected by a blue line. Ashley supports our brave boys in blue, which isn't a massive surprise. There's also a vertical banner which reads AMERICA just in case anyone was so terminally fucking stupid as to have forgotten where we are.

We drive slowly past the woman's house, which brings us both a great feeling of satisfaction for reasons which are quite difficult to describe. There is about as little substance to this person as we had guessed, and that's always good to know. She's an assemblage of signifiers calculated to annoy liberals. It doesn't really matter what she supports or claims to support because the most important detail will always be who it annoys. None of this shit is even consistent. It's just a symphony of differently hued raspberries blown at anyone who ever read a book, or tied their own shoelaces, or who once called you something hurtful, perhaps implying you were a bit of a fuckwit in some respect.

When was the last time you heard anyone banging on about freedom or the Constitution in service of a cause which wasn't about them getting to dictate what happens with everyone else, and which wasn't in response to something which has no impact on their own continued existence whatsoever?

It really feels like it's been a while.

Meanwhile, the Yelp page for the woman's hair salon has all but vanished beneath a deluge of negative reviews. She's replied to a few of them, a form response explaining how she knows the reviewer has never even visited her salon and can therefore expect to hear from a cyberdetective she has hired to tackle such fraudulent submissions.

That's how it works, see!

Scary.