TheNamelessThing.com

A few years ago, whilst in the process of rendering myself paralytic shitfaced drunk in a pub on Martha’s Vineyard, I entered a conversation with two gentlemen standing beside me at the bar. They were clergymen, apparently, a large older Kiwi chap (who turned out to be a Maori) and a younger American. They were throwing them down at least as fast as I was, and before long we’d undergone a round merger and were chasing the giant-sized beers with various shots, heaping up a hideous three figure tab spewed from the digital bowels of the credit card machine on a vast paper roll before us on the bar. The New Zealander was a very jolly preacher, and his skin was quite golden. I asked him, “D’you think the world’s population will become homologous in the next fifty years? Will it be all coffee-coloured people by the score and all that, d’you reckon? The end of War, and a global brotherhood?”

The monstrous Maori took a deep pull on his flagon, and shook his head slowly. I thought I’d managed to ask a pertinent question, him being a man of the cloth as well as a person possessing an interesting ethnic identity. But no, I was either too drunk or not drunk enough, for the answer hit me like a bucket of cold blood, and its viscosity hung from my eyelids, ears and neck like sharkbait, while I lolled and roiled and tried not to collapse under the weight of my self-administered poisoning.

“That’s the last fuckin’ thing we want, mate, really”, he said, his immense cranium drooping like a fat, glistening bud of well-fed home-grown in a lightbox in a wardrobe in a flat on an estate in some secretly tropical Mancunian quadrant, encrusted in gemstone-like sap. “If ya think about it, if we were all exactly the same, then the bastards that control everything would be able to control us even easier, and they could save billions on advertising and everything, cos we’d all have similar tastes and medical conditions and the whole cultural and commercial landscape would be uniform. Fuck that! They’d even turn the fact there were no wars to their own advantage, but not ours…”

He raised his beaded gold head and took another guzzle, while his American sorcerer’s apprentice looked on glumly. I’d never thought of it like that before; I’d always imagined a complete blending of the races to represent a kind of end to global conflict and a new dawn over this bedraggled, fractious tribe called Humanity. Funny, that.

Which brings me to the FC United of Manchester saga, or the “Football is Finished Because of Foreign Investment Which is Really Just Debt” saga, or the Malcolm Glazer saga, whichever you prefer. In a recent edition of UWS, there was an article proudly stating that those who’d walked away from United and created that other team (which they understandably decided to call United) were in some way leading a fight-back, an alternative to the option of getting screwed by the yank and the unmanageable debt management scheme which the club we’d loved for a lifetime had become.

Just to recap, the article went something like this: The best way to fight against this tide of foreign investment which constitutes an intrusion into our age-old values in a football league and football clubs we’ve loved with all our hearts all our lives is to voluntarily remove ourselves from the picture and form little clubs who play in little leagues while simultaneously providing endless lip service to the fact that we’re not at all happy leaving United behind but we hate this Glazer person so much that we have no choice, and anyway most of the people attending games at OT these days are wankers and jester-headed muppets in replica shirts so we’re happy to take the hardcore of United’s true support to enjoy re-enactments from the 70s and 80s in little shithouse grounds every week, while drinking ourselves into oblivion into the bargain.

The big question that hangs over this sodden, top-heavy panorama is this: If the FC people have their way, and a mass exodus of “true” football supporters pours torrentially away from United towards FC, does that mean Old Trafford will one day be completely filled with dickheads who started supporting United in 1996, and a form of psychological/emotional homology will ensue, whereby our entire fan-base will all want the same things, all suffer the same fears, and all enjoy a similar atrocious level of footballing acumen, while “true” fans kick around in the little leagues on the piss and whingeing about how they didn’t really want to leave United? If so, this situation is identical to the one the Maori Holy man described, with all heterogeneity expelled and only uniform, herd animals to cater to. The wild seed will have gone, displaced by the docile cash cows who never complain when the price of a pie goes up or even the price of a ticket. This is part of their plan and you cunts are falling for it. Just like the man who runs a business and is clueless about his industry, whose employees are truly the ones who provide quality control (cos he couldn’t if his life depended on it), but who are all totally expendable whatever they might like to think, Glazer actually wants you to piss off out of it and play down there in the mud. You are the thorn in his side that voluntarily removed itself, and in the process removed a huge dissenting voice from the Theatre of Dreams.

The sharkbait that falls away from the Theatre, in tiny viscous red droplets that cling for dear life to their Mother Ship before plopping down into the non-league horse latitudes and joining the admirable rise of their little boat as it makes progress, is the lifeblood of United’s future. It is the blood United needs if it is to survive as a credible entity in this world. All you red chums who’re pissing off into the wild blue yonder with FC were the reason Glazer was attracted in the first place. But he misunderstood the English working-class culture to his advantage, for he was raised in a country where passion and spontaneity are rare in sporting crowds, and he inadvertently created just such a crowd at OT, once all that blood had been drained off. The sterile professionals and their spoilt brat kids are precisely the type of unreacting cunts corporate football is looking to draft into the stadiums, while the enchanted gene pool that made football what it is are off on the piss at Woolyback City or Sheepshagger Town, giving it their all in the name of freedom, scything through the doldrums with mad abandon. The question is, should you be inventing loads of funny, intelligent songs down there in your seaweed playground, or should you be at United games singing songs that you’ve invented about Glazer, trying to displace the fair-trade coffee-coloured people who are currently displacing you by the score? The sun-bed technologists, the Chinese day-trippers, and the naughty forty thieves of Aladdin have pilfered your season tickets and parked their arses, rubbing their hands and fondling their digital cameras with glee. What Millwall, Everton and Chelsea never managed, this crew has.

I know I shouldn’t have said that, cos it’s a little taboo to slag off FC, and honestly I’m not doing that, really, but United and FC are kind of mutually exclusive and to pretend that FC are part of United is fucking delusional. FC sounds like a great day out – the kind of day out we all remember and pine for from days of olde – but is a day out worth allowing a herd of slobbering Wilburbeast to come and occupy that sacred waterhole without a fight?

During my recent studies, I am forced to visit a local slaughterhouse in the wee hours of the morning, way up in the hills of Western Massachusetts in the sort of town horror writer HP Lovecraft told us to avoid, for there be fish-people there, swarthy characters with bulging eyes. Devil-men. I visit the strange little place in order to obtain the tissue of freshly slaughtered bulls for extraction of specific immune cells for genetic analysis, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is that these splendid animals, these kingly specimens, were killed using the Halal method. That is to say, they have their throats slit deeper than you can possibly imagine, and are consequently hoisted on an electronic winch and chain by one back hoof into the air, where they half-heartedly struggle, ever more weakly, as that viscous red torrent flows down and washes all around us, disappearing down a hole in the middle of the slightly concave floor. Presently the beast expires and I watch, fascinated, as the redneck fish-men run in to behead, dismember, skin, and finally slice it longitudinally in two with a chainsaw, all in a trice. A bull becomes two sides of beef in a matter of minutes. At that point I acquire the tissue of my preference, and store it on ice in a saline solution prepared meticulously the previous evening in the lab, but that’s not fucking important so why the fuck am I rambling again?

The point is, whilst watching the enormous, proud bulls writhing elegantly as they were upended and bled, a parallel to the club I love so much popped into my mind, and the manner in which it is succumbing to an age-old euthanasia. Results from scientific tests indicate that the Halal or Kosher method of slaughter is vastly more humane than our own gun-oriented western bolt through the brain, and I am inclined to believe those data. The bull who receives the bolt quickly transforms into an explosion of quivering, chaotic spasms, which persist for some time, obviously in intense pain. The Halal method involves only a whispered name, a quick slice, and the world gently slips away.

It is tempting to use the slaughterhouse as a metaphor here: The scarlet flush that follows the cutting is United’s circulatory blood, that which travels. The blood remaining in my tissue samples belongs to different genetic stock, and refuses to budge. Rebellion extends back as far as the Romans, the Saxons, and the Vikings, and it is perhaps the DNA inherent in the cells in my icebox, the non-travelling kind, that will be our solution. These are the Special Forces, those that will always come to outwit the invader, and always have. It is this aspect of the great beast’s immune system, not the mobile cells but the static ones, that might end up standing firm and taking a beating, while the carcass goes to market and the rest rush off down that fucking grid in the floor.

This is what is happening to Manchester United, “big” United as certain parties now refer to the club. Its lifeblood is being humanely drained off by those with a superior agenda. They watch and smile as the torrent gushes its crimson tide. They laugh, all the way to the bank in one direction, all the way to the North West Counties league in the other, but they are complicit in this putting to sleep of a once beautiful and proud animal, a thing I have loved with all my heart since I was old enough to think. May my love, my red darling be put merely to sleep, but if it goes further than that, if these parties refuse to wake up, then it will be beyond resuscitation, and then I will be inconsolable.

Of course, I have my work to engage me, to keep my mind off the horrible plight of Manchester United. I flit along the back-roads in the dark hours, thinking black thoughts, in search of useful tissue. It’s all about the genes, but sometimes the slaughterhouse fails to deliver, and I am forced to take out my sleek black chopper (calm down, calm, down). This is my version of FC and the NWCL, and every match is a night match and every colour is like my streamlined craft. Then, my sons, I sweep further inland, far beyond the hills of New England, to the inexplicable stupidity of the American Midwest, where the rednecks make my local fish-men look like physics professors. I come thud-thudding from the sky and my target knows nothing. Infrared is the only way, and I am invisible even to the Indian medicine men. When I have gone, with my icebox loaded with saline solution and assorted tissue sections, the farmers come out to see what the fuss is about. And then they find them, and the conspiracy theories start; their life, their source of nourishment, bizarrely mutilated at odd locations, apparently with an incredibly sharp scalpel, dead, for no apparent reason. They speak of aliens, of government agents, and of unspeakable hybrids of the two, but they are ignorant and foolish. The sleek black chopper throbs as I guide her home, a great crater grieving my heart, silently contemplating the love that will never die. I pat my icebox, and promise to treat it with utmost respect and care, for it contains the future. It is my solitary payback to the nation that spawned Malcolm Irving Glazer, but it does not make me happy. Such a legendary thing as United can’t be left to slowly die, as humane a method is being used, for it is a crime against the spirit of this city. Wake up and smell what’s in the syringe, lads. Don’t make me come over there. Just cos it feels good doesn’t mean its right.