by Joel Golby
It’s when I saw some goths recently that I realized I would never be Lenny Kravitz, or a goth, and it was then that I gave up on the leather jacket dream forever. They were wearing leather trench coats, the goths, and baking under the summer sun: you could sort of smell the musty scent of parched skin coming off them. But I admired their dedication to the leather cause: they all looked good in it, despite all very visibly looking like they were poetry writers. There are various ways you can wear a leather jacket—rock-star cool (Kravitz, Alex Turner); rock-star uncool (Chad Kroeger, Adam Levine); country-star uncool (Blake Shelton, constantly); actor uncool (Kevin Bacon, in one of those collarless jackets, the ones that definitely come with a pair of wraparound shades in the pocket). You can look like one of those lads who keeps going to underage emo nights long after he has graduated from college, or one of those kids who was in a band once but then the band broke up and he hasn’t cleaned under his fingernails even once ever since but he wants you to come to his house to watch him play guitar about it. Metalheads look absolutely fantastic in leather jackets. Instagram fashion girls in wide-brimmed hats. You can look like an aged fashion type, Goldblum-esque, as if you smell of rich sandalwood and tobacco scents. Or you can look like I do: a tight-faced American divorcé waiting for his children at the school gates, desperately trying to make them think he’s cool again after that time he cried in front of them and begged for their mum back. Sometimes you just have to admit things to yourself, and the goths and Lenny Kravitz and the leather jacket experiment have made it thus. I will now cart two leather jackets through five house moves and ultimately keep them locked in a trunk. I am not—however hard I try about it—a Leather Jacket Guy. That’s one thing I’ll just never be.
All the Fights I’ve Lost
If we were to build our culture anew over the bones of the old one, erasing all that came before it but maintaining our government, society, the buildings we have and all the progress we made, the fact is this: if we had to start again and pull religions up out of the ground, at least one of them would be dedicated to M&Ms. One would be dedicated to Oprah, too, and one for Beyoncé. A religion for Pepsi, a religion for Oreos, a religion for Manchester City FC. We would tie ourselves to brands and heroes and enshrine them in mysticism and lore. And there, towering above all, monstrous and huge and all-encompassing, Red and Yellow, our M&M spokescandies, our monsters, our gods.
I am a big guy. I am six foot four, but when people ask me how tall I am, I tell them I’m six foot two, because it sounds more modest. (When you are six foot four and you tell people your real height, it sounds like bragging.) (There is only one perk to being that tall and that is: every time you walk around a supermarket, an old lady will ask you to get a box of cereal down for her from a high shelf, and you can feel very warm and wholesome in doing that.) I weigh myself every morning—that is my religion!—and as of right now I weigh 195 pounds, or the same as 97,362 standard-sized chocolate M&Ms. I have long legs and enormous reach. That is what I tell myself, with that internal check against the monologue that always runs throughout my head: I could win a fight, if one started now. In the street, sizing up opponents, shorter men with beanie hats on and their hands firmly in their pockets. I could defeat them, I think, with my superior reach. All men do this, constantly. I have no evidence to support this, but I feel like my natural physical qualities—height, weight, general enormity—could, with a spirit of hard work and a physical discipline I have never exhibited for even one second in my life, but maybe if it was put into me magically somehow, maybe I was hit with lightning and something inexplicably happened to my chemistry, perhaps if a wizard cursed me to be less distracted by my phone and actually take my gym bag to work with me, if the stars aligned thus: I could get strong, so strong, I could train myself to be a monster. Physically, I am primed to beat the shit out of an M&M.
The M&Ms are hornier than most food mascots. Most food mascots are 0 percent horny. Every single cereal-box cartoon character: demonstrably unhorny. Every time a yogurt comes to life, or a soda can grows arms and legs; whenever eyes blink open on the horrid lifeless face of a tin of condensed milk, all of our living foodstuffs are unhorny. Except for the M&Ms, tinged with a streak of rated-R maturity. There is Red (voiced by cartoon voice-over royalty Billy West), and Yellow (voiced by literal Oscar winner J. K. Simmons). There is Green, too, the first female M&M, fluttering eyelashes and white thigh-highs, whose very existence begs the question: Do M&Ms fuck? (There was an urban legend that the green M&M contained some secret ingredient that made people horny, so ad executives made the green M&M horny. It is not clear what came first: the myth about the horny M&M or the horny M&M. But this much we know: the green M&M definitely fucks.) I think all the M&Ms fuck, secretly, in the share-sized bag in the cinema before you consume them while watching the credits.
The M&M is the dark-timeline snack. In the ’70s, a Russian study suggested the red food dye amaranth caused cancer in humans: despite not containing the dye, M&M pulled the red shell from bags, replacing it with orange, and for ten years the red M&M was steeped in death, in blood, shunned. M&Ms were famously part of Van Halen’s rider, with the brown ones picked out (if a tour venue did not demonstrate the attention to detail necessary to pick the brown M&Ms out of a bowl, Van Halen reasoned, they could not be trusted to safely assemble a complicated light-and-sound rig—this was spectacular logic from four guys who were almost pathologically On Cocaine): it is not hard to imagine Van Halen, slick with the sweat of hours onstage, mainlining M&Ms by the handful while making groupies do something appalling. M&Ms came up in the war years, and have an element of danger to them not found in other chocolates: M&Ms were for soldiers, tired of their ration-issue chocolate melting in the field when they were trying not to get shot. The M&M factory in New Jersey produces eight billion M&Ms per day, which is so many M&Ms, so many. There are M&M’s World stores in every major tourist city on the planet, where people travel thousands of miles, from hours away, to look at M&Ms and large plastic versions of M&Ms. My first visit to New York was essentially spent wide-eyed and looking at M&Ms: plain, yes, peanut, obviously, crispy and pretzel, but also strawberry flavor, chocolate mint, M&Ms in family-sized bags, M&Ms you could drown in. M&Ms are all around us, constantly, billions of them out there in the world, in bags and tubes and buckets. From the M&M page of the Chocolate wiki: “Red…Turn-ons: When people blindly follow his wise advice. Turn-offs: When people fail to recognize his obvious leadership abilities. Best Friend: Yellow (they got their shells together).” The spokescandies have backstories, friends, likes, and dislikes. The spokescandies have rich interior lives. There is a running theme in the commercials where we see the spokescandies eating the very M&Ms they are made from, making them literal cannibals. The spokescandies are so ubiquitous they have essentially become background noise. We never ask why they both talk like Mafia henchmen given a low-key operation to tail someone’s girlfriend to see if she’s cooperating with the police. We never ask if we could defeat them in unarmed combat.
SCENE. INT. DAYTIME. The door opens in a white-and-cream domestic bedroom. It is well kept and the linen is clean. A woman fumbles in the bed in a silk pajama top, the Hollywood shorthand for having just had sex. Her husband, dressed in shirtsleeves and a tie, walks through the door. “Scott,” she says as he drops his briefcase, heart shattering like glass, “it’s not what it looks like.” Scott lowers his voice to an accusatory whisper. (Remember this is an advert for M&Ms. Remember this is trying to make you want to buy M&Ms: the idea that M&Ms are horny.) “You were going to eat him without me,” Scott says, “weren’t you?” The red M&M pops out from beneath the sheets, and it’s clear that he has been rutting. The yellow M&M peeks out from the wardrobe, and it is clear that he has been watching. And then Red, in full “get outta here!” Paulie-from-The Sopranos voice, says: “Now the biting makes sense.” And holy shit, holy shit. Holy shit holy shit holy shit. The M&Ms are Mafia guys.
From
now on we will refer to the red M&M as Red and the yellow M&M as Yellow, even though I deem them both too monstrous to have ever earned names.
Why is it important that the M&Ms are Mafia guys? Because, crucially, that makes them fighty. Fundamentally, a dwarf-sized sentient M&M is not a formidable fighter: their hard candy shell, when scaled up in size, might be an inch or two thick, giving them a technical shield advantage, and also the fact that they are slick and sugar-coated means they might be hard to pick up and throw and smash, making them a difficult adversary, but fundamentally, if an M&M grew to about four feet in height and woke from an eternal slumber to become instead alive, it wouldn’t be a hardened fighter. But being from Mafia stock, talking like a wiseguy, fucking a dude’s wife behind his back (It is not explained in the M&M canon whether M&Ms have dicks and how they might disguise them when not in use, like M&Ms do not wear underwear, but also in the advert Red was trying to fuck and Yellow was trying to watch him fuck, so we know that M&Ms are both capable of getting horny and being so horny it subverts normal horniness tropes to become perverted. Is the dick the same color as the M&M shell? Undoubtedly. Is the M&M dick also sugar-coated and wrapped in a protective shell? I believe so, yes.): this is important. This makes Red a guy who goes to strip clubs, and carries a piece, and shouts a lot while eating and driving. Red could have been in The Sopranos, some no-storyline guy who shoots a police officer in the head one night and has to flee town. This means he came up and paid respect to a made man and then became one. He wears shell suits and has a hard-done-by wife who keeps the fridge well stocked and the house immaculate and does not mind him banging chicks on the side. Consider this: Consider Tony Soprano had a large peanut inside of him. Imagine how mad he would be, even on top of how mad he already was. That is the extent of the candy-coated anger we are dealing with.
The entire fighting career—wins, draws, and losses—of Joel R. Golby (b. 1987):
WINS
FIGHTER
Jason, a new-to-our-school kid who I’m pretty sure was in foster care and smoked from the age of about nine, one of those kids.
REASON FOR FIGHT
It was school sports day and we were supposed to shuttle round the playground doing points-winning games, but when it was our group’s turn to line up and take shots on the basketball hoop, Jason hogged the ball for ages, taking throw after throw after throw, getting more and more frustrated at the repeated air balls, and I, in the queue behind him, intercepted as the ball bounced back, then turned away and swished it—arguably the coolest personal moment in my entire life—so he fucking punched me in the head.
OUTCOME
I don’t really know how exactly, but as he arrowed at me to try and get a second punch in, I twisted around and instead tripped him onto the floor and hit him in the head like three or four good times (I was like eleven—eleven-year-olds can’t hit) (please do not feel sorry for the punched foster boy!) before a teacher dragged the two of us apart. By the letter of the law I should have been very punished for hitting the foster kid, but I think my headmaster had had about enough of Jason’s shit already in his six-week stint at our school and I was a real, real kiss-ass of a teacher’s pet, so he let me off with a half-stern warning and Jason got detention. TKO.
DRAWS
FIGHTER
A bouncer at Leeds Festival who had exactly half his teeth in his head—but split vertically, the teeth, so he had half the teeth in the top left and bottom left of his mouth but none in the right side at all, possibly the most sinister tooth configuration I have ever seen, either in a movie or real life. I mean I can only assume this dude got his head, like, stomped entirely on, and somehow survived that. I mean if someone stomped half the teeth out of my head I would just die out of politeness both to the stomper and myself—who, truly, wants to get up from that.
REASON FOR FIGHT
We were camping in the VIP camping area outside of the main arena, which entailed exiting the arena proper and briefly walking in a non-festival-designated no-man’s-land and then looping back in to the campground where we were staying, and my colleague forgot his lighter, so after going through security once, then twice, we had to turn round and go through it a third time, and the half-tooth man conducting checks with his team did not like my “smart mouth” or “fucking smart mouth” when I made a wisecrack about us being searched for drugs three times in fifteen minutes when clearly I had already taken all of my cocaine because why else would I be running my mouth at a bouncer—
OUTCOME
No actual punches were thrown, but that was only because like four other security guards had to drag the half-tooth man away from the front line whilst saying soothing things like “He’s not worth it, mate” and “Don’t go back to prison” while a curt but formidable female guard ran a single blue-gloved finger around the inside of our belt line. DRAW.
FIGHTER
Someone’s brother who is hard, in goth bar, Chesterfield circa 2013.
REASON FOR FIGHT
One of my mates had got off with a girl who it turned out had a boyfriend on the other side of the bar, and he had got off with this girl directly outside of the bar we were all in, so our mates and his mates all had to dutifully troop outside while they sorted it out, and they did that kind of half-fight thing where they actually end up talking and hugging and saying “sorry, mate” and buying each other beer about it. This was a strange and unsatisfactory end to the fight, and there was a lot of built-up testosterone in the air because two dozen lads in their early twenties had trooped outside to fight and then not had a fight, so there was an electricity there that could only be dissipated if someone else got hit. This is how male aggression works! Sorry about it!
OUTCOME
Oh, so after we’d all gone inside, I was laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing (imagine a guy buying you a beer as an apology for being mad you kissed his girlfriend! what kind of parallel world!), and while laughing, I caught the eye of this guy directly opposite me across the bar—it was a large square bar that segmented the entire building; you had to go out one door and through another to get to it, or hop the bar if you were really mad—and he seemed just monstrously pissed off at me, very visibly pissed off, in his face. I hadn’t been in town for a while so wasn’t well versed in the local fight lads, so turned to my friend and said, “Who’s that? He seems mad,” and was told in no uncertain terms: Don’t, Mate, He’s Someone’s Brother and He’s Hard. Things took a turn because that information made me laugh and then the tangible aggressive energy in the air sort of broke, and all my mates—knowing more how the ley lines and contours of this small backwards town worked, and which brothers were hard, and who was happy to compact the skull of any stranger they ever saw laughing freely—put a coat over my head and barreled me out of the place like I was Lindsay Lohan exiting a courtroom. Purportedly the Hard Brother spent the next hour and a half “looking for me” and telling anyone who would listen that he was going to “fuck [me] up.” I’m calling that a DRAW.
FIGHTER
A small angry freckled boy from a couple of forms over who was very angry ever since the industrial-accident death of his father, but who was a good twelve inches shorter than me, making him (angry, short) possibly the best analogy for an M&M in my fighting history.
REASON FOR FIGHT
All the boys from my form, 7E, had grouped around all the boys in his form, 7F, and decided that they were all going to have a fight, but couldn’t decide who exactly was going to fight, and why, so just sort of stood around in a group shouting a bit, until this angry freckled kid came forward into the center of the hoop and said he’d throw down (he was very angry since his dad got mangled into a machine). I was just mildly walking past at the time eating a bag of crisps and was not involved at all with the fight foreplay, and was called over and ushered into the group and, long story short, ended up in the center going, “No, mate, I’m not going to fight you,” and then he smiled and
leapt up and got me in a headlock and ran me headfirst into the door of a car. This fight was in a parking lot, hence the car being there. The crowd immediately dispersed.