Epiphyte Unlimited

Fridays used to be my favourite. Some customer would come into Epiphyte Unlimited to gawk and not to buy, but it kept me busy. I am small with cheeks fat as a chicken’s rump. Customers like that. They didn’t want some strange looking man towering above them, and a bucolic look makes them feel safe. I’d show them round the different pods, ‘watch that doesn’t bite you’ at the mouth and teeth section; ‘let’s head this way,’ at the cranium and skull pod; ‘hands off’ at the digital fingers and toes section. In company speak: ‘Small things become large things’. So daft jokes, small conversation fillers, whilst perusing pods, was the beginning of a conversion process, something like the ‘arms and legs had a fight, what do you think kicked it off?’ It was stupid, but made the customer feel safe and in control and pretty soon I could nudge them alone into a two years credit for new teeth, or new eyes, nothing to pay upfront for the first six months. Perfection is never quite perfect enough.

Even though I was the top salesman for Epiphyte Unlimited ten year out of ten, well nine year, but the other year was my first, so that doesn’t really count, Head office started making my life miserable. There were protocols for greeting a new customer. Protocols for greeting an established customer. Protocols for every subject, but what to say when there wasn’t a protocol and it was all common sense.

‘Well,’ my boss Julia would say, drawing out the lls, while she thought of something that wasn’t in the manual, ‘if you don’t understand you’ll probably need to go to head office for further training.’ I’d never been to head office. I left that to Julia. She spent most of the day examining her fingernails. She didn’t have to. She was beautiful, but felt she was misunderstood, which she was, I hated her, but never told her that. I told her nails were perfect. I’d sold her them, but she’d catch me looking at her ears that were a mite too thin.

Julia, to be fair, was good at spread-sheets. Head office loved spread sheets more than Julia loved her new big toes (which were slightly smaller than her former big toes, more rounded, less square, yes, I sold her them). How many customers came in? head office needed to know. Julia had it covered. What did the customers ask about? Julia asked me and got in right down on the spread sheet. What were out biggest sellers? Well, that was easy: donkey dicks. Donkey dicks were such a success, and we made such super fun profits, that other companies started moving in. Soon we had the horse dick. The double donkey dick. His and her’s donkey trick (three dicks for the price of two). The list was endless. Horses in fields, standing about minding their own business, were being raped and ruptured. It couldn’t continue. There was a downsizing.

Let’s face it that was the high point. Head office used a graph, with sales and time on different axis. During the summer of love in the sixties, it was hard on time. We gave guys bigger dicks and then we started giving them new noses, new mouths, new eyes, new heads, new arms, new legs, new everything, all for the very reasonable price of a small country. Where did the money come from? I don’t know. I didn’t see any of it.

Then, of course, there was that crazy time during the seventies when every second person through the door wanted a pair of angel’s wings. Then there were accidents, and bad press. The News of the World headlines told us to stick to what we did donkey dick best. I don’t mean accidents, like jolly japes, the pigeon arsed rich shitting on you from above, and swooping down and stealing you lunch. I mean men, and it usually was some arsehole guy, thinking because he’s got a pair of wings that he can fly the Atlantic. Well, they’re fish food now and I’m pretty sure that’s what they deserve, because there are no free lunches and if God intended us to have a pair of wings He wouldn’t have given us such fine legs for walking with. We’re bipedal for a reason.

The other craze and this was a kids’ thing, a reaction against all that beauty, was getting an implant of some marmoset or baboon face. They took it the whole way, developing their own language and art, free love, and living in communes, aptly called ‘zoos’. It was good for the economy. People used to come from abroad just to look at them. Around Georges Square they were a tourist attraction. Sure, some of them were ripped off. The case of a Scandinavian man having his leg pulled off by a real gorilla in Calderpark springs to mind. But you get charlatans in any walk and we are a respectable hi-tech business.

What did it for me was paperwork and the feeling I was always being watched. There was no subtlety. An eye sitting on my desk. Another in the bathroom. Even when I went outside to Greggs for lunch some eye would be looking at me. The problem was, of course, I was taking commission. Those at head office didn’t seem to understand that the more I sold the more profits they made. They wanted to make me more beautiful than everyone else. In the process I’d be working for them, paying them back more and more of my wages like Julia so that I’d never own myself. Epiphyte Unlimited would own me. All I would own would be the clothes I stood up in and since that was an Epiphyte Unlimited jacket and trouser set my chances of making a clean break would have been as slim as Julia’s waist.

I decided to resign while still a head. I rented a small shop in Dumbarton Road, Dolorifuge Aquarium. I hadn’t left Epiphyte Unlimited empty handed. I’d also a few mutant cells and lots of empty tanks. If I couldn’t sell handfuls of hands I could hatch silver niaiseries of donkey dicks that could perfect speech and tell the customer to get to fuck and not mean it. An eye for an eye. I’d big plans and the donkey dicks to do it on my own.