Smiths' Meat is Murder

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

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

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.