Zang™ (2)

Pronunciation:  /zæɳ/

noun

a highly-sugared soft beverage (UK) targeting the child-adolescent demographic.

cf. made with twenty per cent fruit concentrate and oil-based colours from the art shop in the precinct, poured down the rank white necks of youth in hot summer gardens straight out of the jug, fleshy lips pressed to glass lip in thickened expanse of the swelling burgundy of active histamine, passed between muddy-fingered boys, red-cheeked and blood-knuckled, by the towering corn that rippled under breeze and was tall enough to hide amongst in the green-yellow fibrous solitude of imminent harvest, and which the late summer drifted straight into, staying out past six o’clock to be reprimanded later in a thunderstorm, and your fat boy’s back got sunburned today – bare-chested, soft flanked, in the back garden with giant raindrops falling onto your skull, mother cut your hair last week, tried to, “nice haircut”; “tonsure twat”, many others; surprising literacy grunted like the premonitory urge of a Tourette’s emission by the mollusc-dumb replicates of the village’s indestructible genetic heritage – and the skin of the shoulders was like a probe to the surface of a, the red planet, and the bastard kids left south of the ‘bridge’ (just planks really, aggrandised by ego and an almost crippling need for self-mythology) wouldn’t fuck with no one no more not now (that week)… it stains the bedsheets on its way out in faded pale orange crusts like fortnight old spunk, and with a glassful of Zang inside me (about 250ml as per the recommended serving allowance) I recall a time when after two years or so of shared friends I thought I’d give it a try with a girl from the street round the corner whose initials escape me, and I talked to her on occasion and it was as you imagine time to be, mincing up truth for the food plate of the world, until one day she tried to kiss me, at least that’s as I remember but I know it cannot be true; it felt like a funny age, eleven years or similar; I thought the kiss a mistake but then it happened again, and in that exuberant youthful misunderstanding – fat! blushing! virginal temple of lipid excesses! – I ran, ran away from her sad, no her angry face: angry at the atrocious indignity which my own now public sexual inexperience that only porn – strewn in damp frayed pages along country roadsides, well-thumbed and even more well-wanked-to, offering some village relief in loose narratives whose own gaping holes mirrored the anatomy they wove around – could hope to elucidate in all its anatomical clarity, angry at the very reputational slander such cowardly frigidity (and in a male for fuck’s sake) would have, was having, on her momentary, heat-stroked, misplaced but burgeoning femininity, fleeting guardless hope. This was the same girl who wept in silence the first time she tried a medjool date before a classroom of baying morons who instead trod the fruit under black soles, overcome as she had been by the delicious beauty of the dark wrinkled flesh; the same girl who some fifteen years later with pot hole eyes that blinked through the computerized intimacy of social networking showed endless semi-pro photographs of determined cleavage and tight denim that carved some right of way to where her cunt began in odours of new metallic wonder, like a different person shadowed by only flecks of past in odd recesses of her skin (around the eyes sunk beneath heavy mascara; in the oft-tongued corners of mouth); the same girl whose small kid, the son of an idiot, got knocked over and later died; it was terrible reading about it in short status updates that linked locations and people in a web of public grief it felt at once intrusive and necessary to ingratiate oneself to; the same girl who I imagine now – divorced and shit-desperate for the peace of oblivion – and who wants not to talk all night like once she would, bikes left like suicide notes on the disused railway lines that linked the soulless villages of the south, and wants instead a filthy party of two rich in genetically activated fruit beverage and vodka mix and just a quick almost spiteful fuck conducted wordlessly, an exam unpassable.

(n.b. such was the almost hallucinogenic sweetness and universally acknowledged deliciousness of the Zang branded product(s) that under the same point of reference the word soon entered common vernacular in the form of [British] slang or predominantly adjectival euphemistic phraseology in reference or allusion to any object purported to share those same characteristics, most commonly the female genitalia, most specifically the vaginal canal.

cf. shit me baby your sweet sweet ace surely tastes as good as Zang.

It is widely acknowledged if seldom discussed that associative comparison between favourite soft drinks and – notably – female genitals is a matter of profound and almost uncomfortable arousal, exemplified even in the pop lyrics from mainly banal or derivative acts [e.g. “my pussy tastes like Pepsi cola”, an image of remarkable depth and potency otherwise absent from the remainder of that particular artistes oeuvre], it’s psychologically complex arrangement of pre-booze, solely flavour-led innocence and graphic sexual reference a singularly enticing one uniting fractured memories, vivid fantasy, soft drink marketing campaigns, gustation and olfaction in a melting pot of frenzied sensuality and desire).