Smiths' Meat is Murder Read online

  One morning as I was jogging my way past the bronze plaque commemorating the deaths of one student and one motorcyclist, my necktie flapping like a windsock, Ray floored the brake pedal of his Dodge as he closed in on me. Fifty mile an hour traffic came to a screeching, nearly murderous halt behind him.

  He leaned over and rolled down the passenger side window in one fluid motion. He dispensed with formalities while I marveled at the audacity of his driving and, tossing something at me, he winked and said, “Here. I’m going to kill myself.” He pegged the gas, leaving a surprisingly good patch of rubber for such a shitty car. In the gutter, sugared with sand put down during the winter’s last snow, I saw written in red felt ink on masking tape stuck to a smoky-clear cassette: “Smiths: Meat.”

  I got a lot of my music back then from Ray. I never had much money to spend on records, or anything else for that matter. I didn’t even own a record player. I had my parents’ old top-loading single speaker cassette player from the late 60s. So Ray would give me tapes of albums he thought were important. Tapes, but no cases, and rarely any writing on them. A band name and album title at best, and always abbreviated. It was his trademark. “Clash: Rope,” “U2: Oct,” “Costello: Aim.” I’d break his balls and say it was his way of making me earn it, meaning I’d have to do the legwork to learn more about an album or band. Maybe it was.

  Of the few store-bought cassette tapes I owned, at least half of them fell into the category of birthday present or Christmas present. Album art, liner notes and the simple pleasure of “reading” an album while it played would remain for the most part unknown to me until I got a decent job. Until then I’d rifle through the stacks of albums at Ray’s house or take the bus to Musicland in Quincy and scribble down song titles and credits.

  On the rare occasion, I’d splurge for a month-old NME or Melody Maker. Which was fitting because in many ways I was always a good distance behind. Plus, it was 1985, and information oozed. The internet as we know it was probably being drawn up on a napkin somewhere.

  I’d make my own J-cards with Union Jacks and pictures of bands with London Bridge or Big Ben floating in the background. I drew Hitler moustaches on assorted Reagans and Bushes. I was so green and into it, I wrote “Anarchy in the USA” on a Sex Pistols tape, and for weeks secretly thought I had coined a new phrase.

  We (meaning Ray and I, with emphasis on the I) felt like we lived in the middle of nowhere, a place where a comeback radio single could make Yes or Deep Purple kings of the airwaves again. An overwhelming majority of the kids I grew up with were weaned off their mothers onto classic Styx and Stones rock blocks. Did the small group of us who liked “faggot” British music feel like we were any better than them? Of course we did. Amen to that, brother. The following exchange illustrates the nearly religious and potentially violent musical loyalty of some of my peers:

  “I think The Smiths are a much better band than Kansas.”

  “You better not say that up at the park on a Friday night, or you’ll get your fuckin’ ass kicked. What are you, a fag?”

  No, I was not a fag, and thankfully “the park” was not one of my usual haunts.

  Getting our hands on a new Smiths’ record (and issued on a major label no less—another victory) reassured us that there was a lot more out there than the cock rock our older brothers tried to score to. Sure, we were trying to score too, but we were younger, and The Smiths were new. Youth beats tradition, like rock beats scissors, or paper covers rock.

  If suicide, AIDS or the bomb didn’t get us, we’d outlive our elders and cash in on the benefits (and misfortunes) of having a greater amount of history to learn from. It gave some of us a perspective that made the rock titans of yesteryear look, well, dumb. And whether it was true or not, Morrissey sang like he was as miserable, terrified and as poorly designed as the rest of us. He captured it perfectly. We figured any teenage kid living through those Reagan years who said The Smiths were too miserable for them was either a liar, an imbecile, or so thoroughly fucked up, they had no idea just how miserable they were.

  Every once in a while, Ray would get his hands on an imported British bootleg, or a ten-inch maxi-single or an EP. They were—figuratively and literally—foreign to me. And much more exciting than the domestic store-bought releases. Even for an active record buyer like Ray, it was hard back then to know exactly where a recording fell in a particular band’s discography, or how huge the gaps in ones’ collection were. Since I had mostly tapes Ray made for me, I was almost completely in the dark. My “collection” was made up of gaps.

  * * *

  “This is the complete new album, right?” I asked later that morning before the start of one of maybe a thousand Latin quizzes we had that year.

  “None other,” he replied without looking at me, preoccupied. He was busy stuffing small cheat sheets up the wide bottom of his necktie. He called it his Declension Tie. It was left over from grammar school Latin, and looked comically stunted, truncated on a guy his size. Ray was the gentle giant type whose big-boned frame housed a potential energy capable of genuine damage. And he was one of the funniest guys I have ever met.

  “Yes, Sister. Right away, Sister. No, Sister, I was just straightening my tie before the quiz, Sister.” His voice could have an innocent child’s queak to it when he wanted.

  He had played on the freshman football team for about ten minutes. He quit after he broke another guy’s shin during the first practice. He told me his heart wasn’t in it, and I always thought many lucky opponents were better off because of it. The shin–shattering earned him a kind of quiet notoriety among the student body. Six foot two with the face and curly blond hair typical of a specific style of Baby Jesus painting: Jesus is probably three years old, naked from the waist up and hairless except for his head. His hands are clasped in prayer beneath his chin. His head is tilted slightly to one side. Eyes, blue and among the most gentle and sweet ever witnessed. The only thing missing is the implied cartoon thought bubble that says, “DO NOT FUCK WITH ME!”

  Ray hit me in the hip with a savage wrist shot during a floor hockey game in gym freshman year. Too close to home. That was our formal introduction. He was on a breakaway, I was the net minder. A thought bubble of my own ruptured and spilled out all over the parquet floor as the red welt rose. Instead of “Pleased to meet you. Thank you very much,” I groaned out feebly, “You fucking asshole prick!” then collapsed, hitting the floor like a pillowcase full of monkey wrenches.

  My lips were actually touching the wooden surface of the gymnasium. A massive pair of hairless caissons lumbered to within inches of my nose. The pain in my hip subsided or was displaced rather by fear as I contemplated the real possibility of being deliberately crushed to death beneath the weight of one of those legs.

  “Nice save, Twinkle Toes,” he laughed, extending his stick like a lifeline. I grabbed on for dear life, and he pulled me to my feet and then some with a single jerk of an arm.

  * * *

  “It’s 1985, and I’m going to Separate Piece this one.” (That meant to go out on a limb.) “This is the best pop song of the Eighties,” I shouted unknowingly while the walkman squealed at full steam in my ears. Greatness sizzled from the tiny speakers and added a gigantic reverb to the snare spring fixed to the bottom head of my eardrum.

  There was and is no debating the obvious genius of Johnny Marr’s guitar playing. To say Johnny Marr’s Smiths–era guitar work was great is like suggesting John Lennon was an unusually talented songwriter. That said, I was a bass player, so I zeroed in on Andy Rourke’s bass playing. He played like no one else I had ever heard, and immediately replaced Bruce Foxton as my exiled mentor. I was intimidated, but optimistic that I could ape his bass style. First, though, I aped Mike Joyce’s hairstyle.

  I also credit Andy Rourke for turning me on to Joni Mitchell. After the first Smiths record was released in America, I read in an interview somewhere that Andy Rourke was really into Joni Mitchell’s music, especially the album Blue. How could t
hat be? Joni Mitchell? Blue? As a foolish kid I thought Joni Mitchell was a whining, marginally talented hippie, which is funny because when I tried to sell The Smiths to a few of the more tolerant hard rock lovers I collided with, they mistakenly described Morrissey with similar words. Anyway, I convinced a reluctant Ray to tape Blue for me from his sister’s album collection. Needless to say, Andy Rourke was right: the album is a masterpiece. (And John Lennon was an unusually talented songwriter.)

  As ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ began its long fade into ‘Rusholme Ruffians’, I had a sad hunch I was listening to the album of my unfulfilled, eroding teenage years. And though I tried to convince myself rationally that there was a promising future ahead of me, I couldn’t help feeling that it was all downhill after eighteen. Even nineteen seemed like little more than a buffer, a Sunday evening, a holding cell.

  “It’s even better than the last album.”

  It was last period and just about everyone in study hall was jarred to attention by my voice. Ray nodded and raised a finger to his lips without speaking. Kids turned in their seats and looked over at me. Some of them were grateful for the boredom–breaking entertainment a single loud voice can provide. Kiley in particular laughed like a struggling radiator that was having no part of it. He was most likely stoned out of his bean from the mimeograph ink on the damp page he was smelling.

  Kiley was one of the more likable stoners, famous for his willingness to try and wrench a buzz from just about anything. He was a trip. Bright red hair, sleepy eyes and covered in freckles. We’d gone to grammar school together, and I sometimes called him by his grammar school nickname, Lobster. I had known him for at least eleven years, and in all of that time, my most vivid image of him was from way back in first grade when he shit his pants. You would think a more touching, if not less uncouth, vignette might occupy the forefront of my memory, but no such luck.

  The nuns took him to over to the convent and cleaned him up. While his soiled uniform trousers did hard time in the holy Maytag, Kiley spent the rest of the day in his shoes, socks, shirt, tie and a pair of purple–blue gym shorts with the school crest silkscreened across one thigh. He was something to see. But most delightful was his lack of shame. When someone asked him what happened, he smiled and said, so help me God, “No big deal. I just shit my pants … Hey, Jimmy, wait up,” then he sauntered off, playing with a yo yo. Come to think of it, it was kind of touching.

  Kiley’s mother died when he was thirteen, from an allergic reaction to an antibiotic they gave her after—I would learn some years later—she had her tubes tied. Kiley began testing his own allergic reactions to various drugs not long after her death. The first time I ever got drunk was with Kiley, in his old man’s boat, dry-docked in his back yard. A neglected twenty-nine footer halfway covered with a blue tarpaulin. I remember trying not to laugh, crouching down in the hold while his father stood outside talking to some aluminum siding installers who were working on the house next door.

  In high school Kiley used to gargle entire vials of super-concentrated toothache medicine sitting in the back of History. He dipped cigarettes in Listerine and readied them for smoking with a hairdryer. He doled them out to the after lunch smokers in The Lung like a yankee peddlar. I tried one once, and it just made me nauseous and gave me a headache, to which Kiley proudly beamed, “THAT’S the buzz.” He was fond of distraction. Who could blame him? Kiley liked The Smiths, but mostly because Ray and I liked them.

  Back in study hall, some of the other kids shook their heads at me in disgust and returned to their hopeless cramming, fearful that a single mediocre grade would translate into that coveted middle management position at John Hancock going to some luckier slob.

  “Please, shut your mouth,” I thought out loud, tunelessly to the defibrillating chord changes in my ears.

  “Eck-scuse-me, mister! Put that away or it’s mine!” Bloody screeched from her perch at the front of the room.

  I looked over at Allison and she was smiling. Not exactly at me, more like for me. She glowed like a brunette madonna night light. She had been secretly reading a paperback copy of Nine Stories tucked inside a giant mindfuck of a religion textbook (we actually had religion textbooks) called Love and Loving. It was supposed to be a hip, how-to guide for Catholic teenagers trying to “get a grip on relationships.” Grip. Grip. Grip. Just remember, no self-gripping. No gripping of another before marriage, and keep in mind, the goal of marital gripping is to make little Catholic-baby grippers. Gripping of another with the same grippables as oneself is strictly prohibited by God. It’s odd, but I never thought for one minute that premarital sex was wrong. Sure, I’ve experimented with long periods of abstinence, but not by choice.

  Allison’s Ups were freshly glossed, and when she smiled, they parted to show me and me alone that her teeth and gums were, unbelievably, as glossy. I was filling up with bravery.

  “Ray, what’s the first song called, the one about the Manchester schools and wanting to go home? That’s a fucking great song. The best fucking song of the decade.” I said more loudly than before. Ray looked over and winked in recognition. Allison smiled at me and blushed, then hid her face in Love and Loving. I had no idea what I was doing to her, but I was doing something right. She had smiled and blushed: two very good things.

  It must have been a combination of The Smiths and my passionate submission to their greatness, the asthma attack (chicks dig the sick guy) or Kirkwood’s Maxi pad fiasco. Whatever it was, I believed I had a chance with her, and a new type of optimism filled me and made me feel more alive than I ever had before.

  “That … will be … enough … of that … mister!” Bloody growled with her teeth clenched. Saliva shot out of the sides of her mouth, all over the audience. She drummed her fingers on the pitted top of her black oak desk, and her talons clacked violently as chips of varnish and patina seemed to shoot from her hands like dead fireworks. A massive green vein in her forehead throbbed catastrophically close the surface of her opaque skin, then thought better of it.

  A single dirty band-aid ran vertically along her left temple and appeared to be wholly and unconditionally accepted by her body as skin. Legend had it that the same bandage had been fixed to the same tract of wrinkled landscape for no less than five years, and that it prevented her three hundred-year-old insides from oozing out onto her three hundred-year-old outsides.

  Allison was no longer laughing. Kiley sobered up. I was alone. Deep down I knew it was a comical situation, but it was still terrifying in a way. It’s no joke: If the nuns broke you at a young enough age (I was pretty young when they started in on me with their notes home telling our parents not to let us watch the TV show Soap or see The Life of Brian), you were partially theirs for life, whether you believed it or not. I could feel my bronchial tubes clenching as three little words from Bloody’s lips grabbed me by the throat, “GET UP HERE!”

  With the help of some dark angel, she pulled a pink detention slip out of thin air. As she wrote, she leaned on the pen so hard it visibly flexed and threatened to explode: Detention—one week. I took the slip in my shaking hand and went to sit down. Allison looked at me and sympathetically mouthed, with soap opera-day–dream slowness, “Fuuuuuuuck.”

  Did she mean “fuck” as an interrogative, an imperative or just a plain old declarative, I wondered, as my tingling body crudely bent to the will of the one-piece desk/chair unit. Allison’s interest in my corporal well being was intoxicating. Briefly, I no longer belonged to the nuns, but to her.

  “And if anyone else would like the same, there’s plenty more where that came from … Mr. Kiley?”

  Though Bloody was one witty and persuasive nun, there were no takers. The room was dead quiet for the remainder of the period. My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it almost exclusively. I kept looking over at Allison to see if she’d look back, but she didn’t. Not once. Not even a nod. No blush. No smile. She just stared at her book and wrote occasionally on a spiral notepad. I was instantly crestfallen and cer
tain everyone could tell. The detention slip was like a sweaty tissue in my hand. My name was a smudge.

  I was jarred to attention when the last bell rang. The crowded classroom split open like a scab. Without breaking stride or speaking, Allison dropped a folded note on my desk as she passed. I noticed she had carefully removed all of the fringe from the paper. I opened the note, alone except for Bloody and her invisible band of dutiful sprites. In blue ink, in the sexiest, most mature cursive handwriting I had seen to date, she’d written the following:

  The Smiths

  Meat is Murder

  1. The Headmaster Ritual

  2. Rusholme Ruffians

  3. I Want The One I Can’t Have

  4. What She Said

  5. That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

  6. How Soon Is Now

  7. Nowhere Fast

  8. Well I Wonder

  9. Barbarism Begins at Home

  10. Meat is Murder

  See you tomorrow,

  Allison

  I was in love with her penmanship. I studied the way she dotted her i’s and crossed her t’s for insight into the secret inner self I imagined she was dying to let out. She was obviously intimately aquainted with the very album that crushed me more with each spin. It was too perfect. A powerful, ready-made connection. Meat is Murder was the giant shaded area of intersection in our Venn diagram. The trick was to somehow convert the motherlode of our love of the album into love for each other.

  Allison’s note read like a thirteen line poem. I went over it a few more times then folded it in a tight, even square. I dried a small place next to the slimy soapdish on the bathroom sink vanity and put the walkman down there. I carefully pried open the belt clip on the walkman and slid the folded note in the place where a belt should be. I gently released the clip and at the same time adjusted the note a little from side to side, just making sure everything was centered and even and preserved.