Smiths' Meat is Murder (2 page)

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.

“Hey, Sully, Dean-o, check this shit out,” his voice boomed in the steam as he slid over the slippery tiles of the shower room floor. Fuckface was exactly the kind of guy who would scratch his ass or fart in his hand and then ask his girlfriend if she thought his fingers smelled funny. A real charming sadist.

Shooting himself in the head or the side or the heart probably never entered Fuckface’s mind, and if it ever did, he had what it takes, the right stuff, to push that thought out and far away.

All that bullshit about what goes around comes around and karma and do unto others is just that: bullshit. It’s the God’s honest truth, he went on to cheat his way into the Ivy League (and most likely through
it) and is now a successful settlement lawyer for a medical malpractice insurance company. Perfect.

* * *

I was dying in Catholic school. It was spring and all anyone wanted to do was fuck. To put it in aviation terms, it was a nasty patch of turbulence. Some kids were vaguely aware of what was going on and did their devious best (or worst) to manipulate this raw, new energy into any kind of usable social skill. They put on good clean complexions, but were completely fucked like the rest of us. These were the jock-snapping athletes. The Fuckfaces, who sported five o’clock shadows (because they could) for good luck days before the Big Game. Connoisseurs of all things lite beer and alpine skiing.

And the vapid, letterman-jacketed party hostesses who wanted so badly to be filled with cherished memories. The class officers with their kickable smiles and second tier sidekicks orbiting them like the small birds who peck clean the teeth of rhinos. Plaque-eaters and plaque-eater enablers. And book stupid to boot.

Another group of the gawky, uncomfortable student body occupied the unenviable place at the other end of the spectrum, and had terror in their astigmatic eyes. Their award-winning sexual frustration took a U-turn
brainward and compelled them to fiddle, not with themselves or each other, but with Ataris, Commodore Vic 20s and assorted woodwinds. They looked war-torn and nervous. Chess club titans who were sadly impotent anywhere outside the jurisdiction of Chess club law. Body odor in perfect dischord with the self-conscious clanking of scoliosis back braces. Book-bagged refugees scrambling through the hallways for cover. They knew the whole world could see, written all over their oily faces, that unknowable things were going on inside them.

Fuckfaces and Pac Men. Promising futures wrapped up in white-collar crime and ring around the collar. An enormous dark ocean separated Club Med from the leper colony. And that’s where the rest of us helplessly drifted, in fear of washing up in either place. Any way you sliced it, just about everyone was miserable.

For instance, the number-one student in my class was a genius kid named Douglas. This kid had never once in his life received a mark other than an A. He was a textbook geek, a yearbook geek, a
Star Trek
geek. The real McCoy. The real Bones McCoy. A shameless Monty Python skitster who preferred to be called Buddy by teachers and students alike. He may as well have called himself Bullseye for the amount of shit that hit him.

Well, Buddy was a terrible athlete, and that’s no exaggeration. I’m trying to be as objective as possible. And even though he could titrate, integrate and differentiate like a Fermi, those skills were not highly prized in gym, especially right before Christmas break, when The President of the United States Fitness Exam is administered.

Anyway, to make a predictable story as quick and painless as possible, Buddy only managed, through some heroic and grotesque take on peristalsis, to inch himself halfway up the rope climb before he froze. A record-breaking number of jeers and negative encouragements boomed throughout the rambunctious coliseum. He would go no further, up or down.

“Crucify him!” someone yelled.

Miss Hall, our gym teacher, had the face and build of a mid-air collision involving Newt Gingrich and Sluggo from the ‘Nancy’ comic strip. She was perpetually dressed in a coach’s jacket and wide wale corduroy coaching shorts that were so tight, when she walked a disturbing “ffffit, ffffit, ffffit” sizzled from her loins.

“Get your fat ass to the top of that rope and back down here a-sap!” The veins in her neck bulged like Alexiev’s.

A smartass named Mahoney started jerking the rope from side to side, trying to liberate the brilliant hunger artist like you would a pear from a tree. Hall swung at
Mahoney with a backhanded hack of her arm wrestler’s forearm. There was a single thud, followed by a short series of smaller thuds, as if someone had spilled the holiday ham from its can onto a hardwood floor. Mahoney came to rest near the bleachers, and crawled like a wounded animal under them for cover.

“Stay out of my sight!” Hall sneered as she repositioned her wristwatch that had shifted dramatically in the attack.

Buddy just hung there, deaf to everything. For more than fifty minutes. That had to be something of a record right there. Reagan himself should have dragged his old bones up that rope and given Buddy a gold medal. I certainly couldn’t hang from a rope for almost an hour while people insulted me.

His parents had been sobbing when they showed up to talk him down. Finally, the three of them collected into a single weeping unit and slouched off toward Christmas break.

* * *

Allison smelled like Halsa brand shampoo. It has a very distinct scent. Not the green apple or orange kind, but the brown henna kind that comes in the bottle with the Swiss mountain scene on the label. I’d say I catch a whiff of that scent on other people no less than once a
month, and it never fails to shake me a little. She wore her hair in a short black bob during what was the heyday of colossal styles, and I was clobbered. At that age I learned a hair-do has magical powers.

I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but sometime during that spring she got under my skin. A simple turn of her head could liberate in me a bolt of libidinous energy powerful enough to shoot my satellite from the sky. Our last names were close in spelling and we were both in the “accelerated class” as they liked to call it, so to my discomfort and delight, she always sat close by.

When she sat in front of me, I’d stare at her through the prison lattice of her chair back and try to make out the lines of her underclothes. Her blue pastel uniform blouse covered the mystery of her skin like a palimpsest. I wanted to scrape away the cheap paint and reveal the hidden pornographic landscape.