Fragments from The King of Personal Shopping
1
LOOK AT ME YOUR VERY OWN IN-STOCK ON DEMAND PERSONAL SHOPPER
who never takes a break; who snacks on shelves and vacations in debt.
Believe me when I tell you this customer: I am the hardest working clown
in this town of tar pits, unisex salons, and adult daycares. And trust me
when I tell you this customer: your order is my Judas Goat, Honda Odyssey driving
okimonos named Disney. I work in six-hour shimmers of half-ass sentience
for you only. My voice estranges me—do not perceive me. I am paid to practice passing
like a Bakelite or polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride: I am the first plastic
patented for my electoral non-conductivity, you cannot pronounce me. My ears
are so dirty, I have not been listening. I am only interested in being rich
and getting skinny thick. To be completely honest, my pussy is too fat
for wage labor—my pussy has progressed past the need for exchange-value—
it is so valorized. Dear customer, I am thinking of the archive when I say this:
I hate you—I hate you like I hate the State, reef on which the revolutions of our century
have been shipwrecked; bleached reef you sign petitions to protect; dehiscent revolutions
sutured with the absent worry of a test-dummy’s check-engine light; wrecked ship
you send cameras to DiCaprio urchin urned boring bourgeois hetro-love-death.
I hope you are safe within the darling federal drama of the social distancing
industrial complex when you learn I killed the King of Personal Shopping.
2
LOOK AT ME YOUR VERY OWN IN-STOCK ON DEMAND PERSONAL SHOPPER
There are many divisions where I work. The bakery is my favorite.
There are so many divisions employees are cut like worms. The bakery is where
bread is made—it is also where the bakers make cookie cake.
If you are unfamiliar with this concept, a cookie cake is a cake
made from many worms we collect from the parking lot. Collecting worms
from the parking lot requires multiple jackhammers. It is no science—
Kansas has no naturally forming lakes. At most this requires three of us:
one to drill, another to watch, and a third to shovel silt from our parking-lot
cookie-cake worm-mines. Sometimes customers fall in, sometimes they are fine—
these are our guests. Another division specializes in selecting which guests
are saved from the parking pits. We call this division Customer Service.
It is as dangerous as reproducing:
often, questions are asked we do not know the answer to,
often, a bushel of bananas will be returned bruised beyond recognition,
often, our guests are glued to the glass cenotaph of their consumption.
3
LOOK AT ME YOUR VERY OWN IN-STOCK ON DEMAND PERSONAL SHOPPER
Orders come printed on a cherry-red, translucent clipboard. The store colors
are red like a dying star’s dead red. My step-father says the store is employee owned—
this we own: a dying star’s dead red, a dying-star’s-dead-red polo, and
a dying star’s dead red-black face mask. I do not wear the face mask. I have noticed
no employees do this while working, instead they smile, and sing
“Yes, how should I help you with what you need”, sing, “Please
patience your patients’ coughs the good shopper are shopping”, sing
“So sorry we are closed, corporate requires our lungs to lift your Lysol quickly.”
I have noticed Kassandra has worked eleven years for our employee owned company
and is now in charge of our employee owned human resource division
where employees report employee owned violations of employee owned
codes of employee owned conducts. During our employee owned orientation
Kassandra tells us she is a 24/7-hour employee. She does not leave the store.
She sleeps on the check-out conveyor belt and wakes when scanned.
She spends Sundays scouring security footage for humans and resources.
She names my nametag my new name Amalia—Amalia meaning to toil—
and I wonder if this is how I am employed as a woman:
enlisted worker, personal shopper, selecting the best produce
for the private productivity bloggers, fortressed 5G-tower truthers, and
oil-index upping Zoom zaddies. I must admit:
when trust is lacking, hope is the managers’ other ammunition. I interpret this to mean
if my manager fails to pay me for free—makes me work
willingly—I should be allowed to shoot at them jollily. I am not kidding—
march the managers up and down each aisle, mushing them with switches of celery,
wrapping them in girdles of guest-used toilet paper.
Amalia Tenuta
Ghoul apologist and back-of-house abolitionist Amalia Tenuta is currently studying creative writing and women's gender and sexuality studies at Emory University where her research focuses on the radical poetics of Essex Hemphill and contemporary transgender verse. Her work has appeared in Crab Fat Magazine, The Columbia Journal, The Columbia Review of Poetry, and elsewhere. When outside the Kansas City cook scene she's in the streets screaming for revolution or organizing the Walnut People's Autonomous Garden. You can follow her on Twitter @lumpenqueeer and the WPAG on Instagram @walnutpeoplesgarden.