Smiths' Meat is Murder Read online

  Meat is Murder

  Also available in this series:

  ____________

  The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, by Andy Miller

  Forever Changes, by Andrew Hultkrans

  Dusty in Memphis, by Warren Zanes

  Harvest, by Sam Inglis

  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, by John Cavanagh

  Forthcoming in this series:

  ____________

  Loveless, by David Keenan

  ABBA Gold, by Elisabeth Vincentelli

  Sign O’ the Times, by Michaelangelo Matos

  Unknown Pleasures, by Chris Ott

  The Velvet Underground and Nico, by Joe Harvard

  Grace, by Daphne Brooks

  Electric Ladyland, by John Perry

  Live at the Apollo, by Douglas Wolk

  OK Computer, by Dai Griffiths

  Aqualung, by Allan Moore

  Meat is Murder

  Joe Pernice

  2010

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

  80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  Copyright © 2003 by Joe Pernice

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pernice, Joseph T., 1967–

  Meat is murder / Joe Pernice.

  p. cm. — (33 1/3)

  1. Smiths (Musical group). Meat is murder. I. Title. II. Series.

  ML421.S614P47 2003

  782.42166’092’2—dc21

  2003011476

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-1425-9

  For L. Stein

  Acknowledgments

  Barker let me run way out of bounds with this one. Stein, Wheelock, Linehan, Harrington and Narducci tolerated me. Zanes aided in my procrastination almost daily. My family set a place at the table for me, even after I told them what the book was about. And most notably, in ’84, The Smiths probably kept Clancy alive, and he, in turn, did the same for me. I’m grateful to them all.

  Author’s note

  If you think of the 33 1/3 series of books as a kind of extended family (please, go with me for a second on this one), then my book is the black sheep: it’s fiction.

  I was pretty sure I was going to throw up. I kept swallowing back the saliva that greased up the tunnel. It was September of 2000, and I was stuck on a train from Boston to New York City, wearing the same sweat-loosened jeans and grimy-necked Oxford shirt in which I’d performed in London two nights earlier. I could smell old Silk Cuts I’d bought on Marylebone High Street and thought it was really something how a stink could travel so far and end up on another continent intact. It reminded me of a poem I once read where a droplet of blood moves in a matter of seconds from the warm beating heart of a man, to the stinger of a mosquito, to the belly of a brook trout, to the bottom of a black, ice-cold pool. I tried, unsuccessfully, to put myself to sleep by drumming my fingers on my legs.

  I was planning on using the trip to put the finishing touches on a break-up speech the girl would not hear for two more years. A slow train indeed. The train was sold out and overbooked. Some people standing in the aisles were bullshit. Every once in a while they’d sigh loudly and say the situation was unbelievable. It was the start of a much anticipated Labor Day weekend, and hot. I was lucky enough to land an aisle seat, and two boys—I’d say they were about twelve or so, and barreling headlong into the high-friction atmosphere of adolescence—sat in the seats next to me.

  I still had a searing headache but my hands were starting to calm down some. The smell of domestic UK booze from my pores was vaguely reminiscent of the Hi-Karate after shave lotion my father used to wear, and that in itself was nearly comforting enough to trip me off to a light sleep. With one eye on the doomed little fuckers and one eye dozing, I half-listened to their conversation in an attempt to convince the shit-out-of-luck seatless trolling the aisles that I was their guardian and therefore couldn’t possibly give up my post. If I was unfortunate enough to make eye contact with someone who was, say, a bit older than me or slightly maimed in some way, I’d shrug my shoulders, gesture toward the kids with my head, and shoot the poor bastard that look that says, My hands are tied. On the inside I was saying, Sorry, paisan. I’m hungover here. I’m going to puke if I get up. Better luck next time.

  They were cousins, I gathered, though Kid One was clearly more advanced, more savvy than Kid Two. Kid One ran a long tapered black comb through his hair every so often until he imagined it to be perfect. They were having a pretty good time, laughing at shit no one else over the age of fourteen (besides me … when not hungover) would think was funny. Though they kept me awake and painfully aware of how close I was to vomiting, the little shits were enjoying themselves so much, I kept my mouth closed. Besides, I wasn’t feeling particularly worthy of their mercy then, anticipating the “Dear Jane” speech I was going to deliver: A giant fuck-you to someone who deserved it the least.

  Kid One’s parents, serious golfers with the fashion sense to prove it, checked in on them every so often between Johnnie Walkers and Parliaments in the bar car. If I had been in any other shape, I might have made bullshit small talk with Mr. Taxcut about Tiger’s showing at some major tournament, just out of boredom, waiting for the drink line to sublimate. Lady Taxcut looked like she had already spent a fair amount of time on the business end of a plastic surgeon’s instrument, and by that I mean his scalpel. Their lightweight cotton sweaters smelled like Greenwich.

  Kid One looked like he might piss himself laughing and his voice cracked intermittently through the set-up of a dirty joke (which I recognized within the first few bars) about a nun, a bus driver, a graveyard and some glow-in-the-dark paint. My sleeping eye stirred. My neck was stiff, head motionless against the forty-grit papery pillow. I shot a glance down toward the little fucker. As his head passed through the cycle of a ninety degree turn, I could picture, for a split second, exactly what he would look like at forty-five years old, and it was a drag.

  He was trying to whisper, but was struggling so hard to suppress a laugh that his words were unintelligible. And Kid Two, also laughing, asked him over and over to repeat himself. They were both in total hysterics by the punch line … which had something to do with subterfuge and anal sex. The words alone just about killed them: anal sex. I started feeling more optimistic, and briefly thought that marrying the girl might work.

  They were twisting in their seats, squealing and taking random slaps at each other. A salt and pepper mustachioed conductor gave them the hairy eyeball as he squeezed his way through the car, padding his hands on the vinyl seat backs for balance. Even I started to break up some, and I’d heard the joke at least ten times (a testament to the timelessness of quality humor). They finally calmed down as the train scraped into New Haven station. As people scrambled to collect their belongings from the overheads, Kid Two sighed a long one, then asked tentatively, “What’s anal sex?”

  “Don’t be a doosh bag,” answered Kid One, pile-driving his elbow down hard on the shoulder of his cousin. He got him pretty good.

  “Ahhh! That really hurt! I was just asking a question,” the victim squeaked then went silent, rubbing the area of his rotator cuff. His eyes welled up to the point of maximum humidity. Kid One looked at me and shrugged, realizing he had gone too far. He’d have to
mop up.

  “You know, A-NULL-SEX,” he said, making a kind of rolling gesture with his hands and bobbing his head in a way that when combined with the hand-rolling generically signifies an activity everyone knows. Surely Kid Two knew what anal sex was. He had to, right? Wrong. Kid One’s pantomime was not shedding sufficient light. Kid Two looked at him, serious and lost. I dried up in my seat, waiting for the other Air Jordan to drop. I was witnessing something pivotal, something more human and evolutionary than I was bargaining for, and it could not be stopped.

  Kid Two was exactly the kind of slow learner requiring the King’s plain English. With my eyes closed and my hands gripping the armrests as if I was readying myself for a root canal procedure, I calmly and evenly spoke:

  “You gotta tell him.” They were quiet for a few seconds, stunned. The creature had come to life. Then Kid Two snickered and said:

  “Yeah. You gotta tell me.” Kid One leaned over to him and, whispering in his ear, changed everything. My eyes were still closed, but I’d bet your last dollar a horrified look of a new type escaped from his face.

  “NO! NO! NOOOOOOOO!” wailed Kid Two. “NOOOOOOOO! NO!”

  Within three hours I was in a record store in lower Manhattan, buying a new copy of Meat is Murder.

  * * *

  I was dying in Catholic high school. Saint Longinus High School to be exact. It was the spring of 1985 and the Reagan era was in full, rotten bloom. Saint Longinus High was a dull-looking hideaway made up of three identical brick boxes on a one-acre patch of heaven in the diseased heart of suburban Boston. Piss-scented marigolds and trees with ratty white flowers smelling like semen did little to gussy up the muddy campus.

  The misery of marching in the rain along the narrow footpaths from building to building, from Latin to Religion, was compounded by the unavoidable puddles hearty with swollen, beached nightcrawlers. It was best to look straight ahead and just walk and try to ignore the occasional wormy cushion beneath your feet. Sound advice a lot of students took to heart while on the inside as well.

  My childhood friend Danny had recently killed himself with a twenty-two caliber rifle. That much I knew. I never found out where he did it, and by that I mean was it in the head or the heart or the side. I really wanted to know. And was there a lot of blood like in the movies, or just a trickle? At the time I was more interested in the wound than I was in the loss of a friend, or grieving. My version of shutting down was to adopt an overworked oncologist’s necessary detachment.

  Why anybody would go through with it (and they were going through with a lot of it that year) was too close to home to really think about. Anyway, it felt infinitely better to vanish into Hatful of Hollow or War. Or turn on the TV and jerk off to Major Margaret Houlihan yelling at a subordinate. Or Christmas “Chrissy” Snow. Or Jennifer Hart. Plenty of that went on as well in ’84 and ’85.

  I also know he shot himself around five in the morning in his bedroom closet. It must have been hard to manage in what can only be described as tight quarters. I’d seen that closet plenty of times. Old hockey equipment, baseball equipment, BMX equipment. Danny had an Irish-twin brother, ten months younger than him, and they tried all sorts of sports growing up. Their parents talked them into it, not in that hateful, Marine drill instructor kind of way, but gently. I think their parents felt guilty because they both worked, and they worried Danny and Patrick weren’t socializing properly. And I suppose they were right.

  “I say he was a closet queer ’cause he did it in a closet,” the public school burnouts—with their wispy, navy-style mustaches barely visible—preached from the back seats of hostile buses. A mere six inches of dead air, wood and skim coat separated Danny’s leaking DNA from its dreaming contributors in the adjacent room. I was developing a borderline unhealthy preoccupation with the flimsiness of the human body.

  His parents found him in a heap, spilling onto a plastic green trash bag full of outgrown summer clothes. I spent more time than I should have sizing up the sealed bags of trash Danny’s father dragged to the curb the following Wednesday. (When I go home to visit my parents, I sometimes still fight an urge to look for traces of his blood at that spot on the sidewalk.)

  I was almost two years older than Danny, and we’d drifted apart since I went to a private high school a few towns away. Our relationship devolved into one shared by neighbors who nod at each other from inside moving cars. It had been only a few years since we were close, but at that age, a few years ago is practically prenatal. I didn’t actually feel much of anything when I heard he was dead. I was too wrapped up in the important, all-consuming business of being a teenager to feel as devastated as I should have. For the most part, only Allison could inspire in me a thing resembling despair back then.

  In retrospect, I’d probably be better now if I had felt worse then. I had shut down so completely for the funeral, that it seemed more like a well-attended, grossly overdressed going away party for someone who had already moved to the West Coast or Canada. The party raged on after the funeral and lasted a good ten years.

  One of the last times Danny and I really hung out together as friends, it became clear to me that one of us was still something of a child. I chased him around my parents’ yard, threatening to stab him in the eyes with a Phillips-head screwdriver. The sky was turning an autumn twilight purple, as clear as day. We laughed ourselves sick, me literally.

  I had really bad asthma right up to my late teens, and that evening I had a severe attack, sucking in the cool air, as I wrestled him down to the mat of damp, septic-tank grass. Even though I was a weak little shit, I was always stronger than Danny, mostly because I was two years older. But not so strong that I didn’t puke tomato soup and Gatorade all over my tan Barracuda jacket (worn inside-out for the ladies), which sent us both MIA into the stratosphere of pure delight.

  When we finally calmed down, resting on our backs, looking up at the landing lights coming to life along the flight path to Logan Airport, Danny considered, panting, “What if that was alphabet soup you puked, and we sorted through the letters and wrote ‘scrotum’ on the Prudhomes’ driveway?” Real puerile stuff that can drag young men of the right age into bottomless fits of hysterics. He looked so young and excitable, smiling in anticipation of my approval, which he didn’t get.

  There was something that struck me as heavy in his choice to use the clinical word “scrotum”, and not one from the holy lexicon of suburban male puberty. He could have said “ballbag” or “sack” or anything instead of scrotum. I felt a new and genuine sense that something was irreversibly over. It was not dissimilar to the oddly calming mixture of cold objectivity and sadness that’s left standing when your romantic love for another person drops dead.

  His dirty blond hair was glued together with sweat near his forehead, and it stuck there in clumps like starchy vermicelli pasta. He was a snapshot of caught in-between while I was stumbling toward the other side. He was vulnerable to say the least, like a thumb with a soft new nail.

  I have no idea what kind of baggage that kid was carrying around with him, but some girl he had broken up with (which probably meant he wanted a new study partner) called him a user, and that was the load that broke him. I’d eat Werner Herzog’s other shoe if Danny had engaged in anything approaching sex with her, so really, how much could he have used her at that age? That’s a stupid question. He could have used her plenty, but he wasn’t like that. I knew him as a really shy, polite kid: polite enough to say scrotum while joking with friends. A good kid with nice parents.

  I can picture the scene: He musters up the requisite courage to brush against her new, angora-sweatered breasts while they’re improv slow dancing to ‘Baba O’Riley’ at some pathetic school mixer, and then a week later sheepishly asks for her to give back his REO Speedwagon albums. Real hateful shit. Whatever it was, it was enough.

  I guess she was moving up the ladder of popularity and had some sway because in no time a lot of kids in the freshman class were calling him User, or The User.
She was considered “hot” by her peers (fourteen with the body of a fifteen-year-old) which—through no fault of her own—made the horny male class body want to impress itself against her advanced class body. It’s easy math. God knows a lot worse has been done in the name of a lot less.

  So the name spread to the other grades like strep, and stuck. It must have been a real drag, and too much for him to take. Day after day, an elbow to the face, a slap on the head, a charley horse from behind and, “Hey, User, use anyone lately?” or “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a big round of applause for … The User.” They weren’t even clever or funny about it. No wonder he killed himself. Who knows, if the jokes had been good at least…

  Even some other outcasts with seemingly dimmer futures at St. Longinus High School saw Danny as their rickshaw to the next level of acceptance and they hopped on board. Maybe he was one of those people who doesn’t stand a chance no matter how many hurdles are crossed. If he had lived through grade nine, he might have killed himself for some other reason in grade ten or eleven. Obviously, he had issues that were all his own. I mean, you can’t blame a heavy metal band if some kids decide to listen to them, quote them in their suicide note, then shoot themselves. And you can’t really knock the grieving, devastated survivors for pointing fingers. Who wouldn’t want an easy answer?

  If I ever decide to take a voluntary dirt nap, I’m going to leave a suicide note and blame my death on a certain American, management-guided missile of a country music singer:

  “Dear friends and family, I know it’s a cowardly act I’ve committed, and I’m truly sorry for the pain I’ve caused each and every one of you. But having recently read in a music trade magazine that the follow-up single to that song by [ ] was soon to hit the airwaves, I found I could no longer live in the world. The thought of it dogged my every step. Missing you already….”

  The same week Danny died, a big news item in the locker room at my school was that a popular jock, bucking for alpha status—I’ll call him Fuckface to protect the guilty—raped another guy (a fringe member of the popular students) in the showers with a shampoo bottle.