Smiths' Meat is Murder (4 page)

Few things were certain in my mind, but one of them was that I had to start a band.

* * *

Death, more precisely suicide, became the hot topic with the kids. Some of the girls in school cried a lot in the hallways, and they decorated Denise’s locker with all sorts of notes, flowers, stickers and mementos until
it too looked like a refrigerator door. Some genius saw the parallel and stuck a phony suicide note to the locker with chewing gum. It said something about going to the big auto body shop in the sky. (I have to admit I thought it was funny in a way, but wasn’t exactly sure why.)

A Spanish teacher named Ms. (Margaret) Kirkwood took the note down without making any big deal of it. Very cool and very unlike your typical high school teacher who would have pursued it like a wolverine until someone, if not everyone, paid. Kirkwood was probably in her mid-thirties, and she knew full well we were all fucked. The guys stood around and watched her crumple the note, then looked at each other, nodding our heads up and down in accord. Yes, we agreed without speaking, Kirkwood was cool.

Later that day I was in the front row of her conversational Spanish class. She came running in a few minutes after the bell, and everyone was going berserk. Kirkwood was in no mood and took charge of the room. Her put-on disciplinarian’s tone got me fantasizing about her.

As she spoke passionately about irregular verbs, I slowly looked her up and down through the sweaty headrest of my fingers—as if I needed any more unsettling stimulae. My eyes scanned her left leg bent slightly
at the knee—Audrey Hepburn/
Roman Holiday
style—and stopped at her calf.

The sanitary napkin was stuck there but dangling, crimson side up. I stiffened in my seat, repulsed, nervous and intrigued. My eyes caught Allison’s, and she whispered, as loud as breathing out, “Yikes.” A bulging, Marty Feldman-like quality to her expression filled me with an amusing ease. And heightened by the potential catastrophe, the significance of sharing a secret with her was not lost on me then.

But, oh, will the crossroads never end? I mused. At hand was the setup of a rare, legend-making scenario of the sort that can transform the remainder of a teacher’s tenure into hell on earth. Certainly there were teachers who deserved it, but Kirkwood wasn’t one of them.

McManus, the steak-faced jarhead sitting next to me, took a hard look toward the bloody mess flapping against her nylons (he could smell the blood), then straight ahead at the chalkboard. Either he had an epiphany of some kind, resulting in an act of low-level compassion, or he was just so fucking thick, he lost his grip on what had momentarily, tenuously and miraculously occupied his mind. He made no motion for a long minute, then just slid lower in his seat and went back to the important work of drawing sombreros on the photos of people in the Spanish book.

After class, Allison hurried to the front of the room and, placing her hand on Kirkwood’s forearm, whispered something in her ear.

* * *

This kid Paul wasn’t really in any grade. He had cystic fibrosis and missed about eighty percent of school. Everyone said he was supposed to be a genius, though no one I knew actually knew him. Kids protected themselves from the inexplicable mindfuck that comes with knowing a dying kid by cloaking the tragic reality of Paul’s condition in some kind of super-genius/loner mystery: “Yeah, I guess he’s sick or something. But he’s so smart he hardly ever comes to school, the lucky bastard.”

When he was well enough to show up, he had a private teacher and took all of his classes in the library so he wouldn’t risk overexerting himself by moving around too much. He didn’t have to wear a uniform like the rest of us. He was known by little more than his disease. Already a ghost.

During a convulsive nor’easter of an asthma attack brought on by allergies from the north and bronchitis from the south, I collapsed onto—and nearly crushed—the tiny card catalogue in the pathetically underfunded library. The entire Dewey Decimal System was thrown
into complete chaos as the maple drawers spilled onto the carpet, and reference cards scattered like money from a blown safe.

The librarian was a deacon (in other words a priest wannabe) who resembled a comically diminutive Charles Nelson Riley. He was a horrible little Hitler of a Napoleon. He knew everyone called him Little Big Man behind his back. He also knew we sometimes covered our mouths and coughed, “Little Big Man, Little Big Man,” to his face. But he was bitter for other reasons that ran deep and were known only to him. And on this occasion my asthma attack was genuine.

“What did you just call me? What did you just call me? I order you to repeat what you just called me!” He was snarling. As I struggled for breath I frantically patted my pockets to locate my inhaler. But before I could grab it, Little Big Man got hold of my arm and started trying to shake some of God’s good sense back into me.

“I’ll teach you some respect, you moron!” he hissed, dragging me toward to door. As he pulled me through the petrified forest of furniture legs and human legs, kicking up reference cards that hadn’t seen the light of day in decades, the eye of my coughing fit was passing directly overhead. I thought I was going to dry heave at his feet. Instead I threw up on his shoes, which had an instantly calming effect both of us. Outside of a groan or two from the weak of stomach, the library (which was
a classroom littered—in every sense of the word—with McCarthy era books) was quiet.

Then Paul, the kid with cystic fibrosis, started in with some wheezy, plangent, high-pitched laughter, like a castrato soloist singing through a didgeridoo. His voice had an inhumanly consistent warble to it, and the pitch of his laughter fluctuated uniformly around a stable root note, the way an electron from the tightest shell buzzes around a nucleus. And then he started to really sing. As in a song. In French. I didn’t have any idea what the song was, but it was definitely French and doleful and minor in key.

By the start of the third verse I was thinking of Allison and wondering if she ever considered marrying me and having a kid instead of doing something really stupid like going to college? I pictured her, baby Simone, and myself living happily, simply, on a houseboat in Paris. Apparently, one of us has just been commissioned to paint a soon-to-be legendary mural (it must be Allison because I don’t paint). And just in the nick of time. Both scenes, the imagined and the real, got me choked up.

Little Big Man affectionately lifted his meathooks from my arm and listened as Paul’s voice rallied unconventionally through a coda that he faded on naturally. You could have heard a pin drop, even on the carpet. Through the kaleidoscope of my tears I could see that
Paul was crying. Then he got up, apologized to Little Big Man and left the room for the remainder of the semester.

* * *

They herded the students, one class at a time, into the main assembly hall for a talk about suicide. They served up the pedestrian stuff about looking for signs of depression in our friends, how we should turn to God for strength in prayer, and how we shouldn’t hesitate to tell a teacher or another “grown-up” if we thought someone was “not okay.” Shit, I didn’t know anyone who was really okay, but I wasn’t talking.

Ms. Duchampe, a crunchy leftover Jesus freak from the 70s, emceed the assembly. We were just glad to be missing class. I could feel Allison somewhere close to me even before I spotted her. She was resting her ear on her hand, and I could make out the wire from a single earphone running along her fingers, vanishing into her shirtsleeve. Oh, to be that wire upon her gloved hand. Her head and shoulders swayed ever so slightly as she flexed and relaxed her thigh muscles to—I could have sworn—the rhythm of an ultra-tinny ‘How Soon is Now’.

The panel on-stage was peopled by our principal Father Clarey (whose talk was interrupted here and
there by his own winces and audible grunts of pain, just some of the perks from a recent and tricky urological procedure), Miss Hall (the ambiguously sexual, ambiguously qualified Gym/Health teacher), and a phantom corpse of a nun known only as Mumbles (who was apparently the school nurse).

Duchampe was kind of hot for a hippie. She looked like an oily-skinned, blonde-haired version of Gloria Steinem’s stunt double. She had far-reaching bad breath that was, for lack of a better word, arousing. Something was changing in me, because before that semester, I would have thought a glimpse (or sniff) of Duchampe’s humanness would have been an instant attraction killer, the way an otherwise fine person’s ugly laugh can disqualify them from the list of those worthy of being loved. But her terrible breath made her sexy and I was learning to go with it.

A couple of the girls in class considered Duchampe their buddy and told her she’d be gorgeous with some newer clothes, an updated hairstyle and a little help from Miss Clairol or Maybelline. Duchampe had been to Altamont, and that meant she was open-minded. I got to sleep more than once jerking off to a fictional, innuendo-heavy rendition of a very real talking-to she’d dealt my way.

“We’re going to have to do something about your tardiness, now aren’t we?” In reality, it was worded quite
differently, and she did not chew her eyeglasses which were textbook John Denver wire jobs, not tortoise.

“Oh, yes we are,” I’d pant toward the ceiling, at the luminescent constellation of sticker stars left over from my childhood, as bare feet interrupted the lamplight that slipped in beneath my bedroom door.

For months after the suicide pep rally, my friend Ray would greet me in person with some variation of the following: “I want you to have my car. I don’t need it where I’m going.” To which I’d reply with as straight a face as I could keep, removing the watch from my wrist, “Here, take this. It used to mean a lot to me, but now … I don’t know. I’d like you to have it. Something to remember me by.” Then we’d laugh until we were choking and bond over references to obscure Borscht Belt comedians we knew about only because we had siblings who were much older than us. Once he telephoned to say he had just begun the lengthy self-basting process necessary to ensure a successful immolation, and that there was a large parcel of cash (unmarked, except for my name) in the trunk of his malignant Dodge Dart Swinger.

* * *

My eyes were really starting to go bad that spring, and to be honest, I was afraid to get behind the wheel of a
car. Though I liked the freedom that driving represented, I was almost nineteen (an old man by American standards) when I got my license. Until then I bummed rides off of friends or slummed it on the bus.

In the mornings I’d get off at the Braintree station if it was before eight thirty and wait for Ray to cruise through the “bus only” lane as a matter of course and pick me up. Then we’d stop for take-out coffee, and we’d smoke, fantasize about girls (though I confess, I did most of the talking) and listen to tapes. Ray had an eight-track player in his car with one of those converters that lets you play normal cassettes. He was a total freak for The Smiths and The Clash, and it’s his fault for making me the same. Actually, he was a card carrying Anglophile when it came to music, but The Smiths and The Clash, in that order, ruled all.

Compared to where I lived, Manchester, England seemed exotic. I’ve been lucky enough to go to Manchester a few times, and compared to where I grew up, it
is
exotic. (My town has the dubious honor of producing a famous hazardous waste dump and a Republican cabinet member.)

Ray and I would navigate the boring streets of middle class suburbia, past the early-70s pre-fab storefronts that were home to tax preparers, carpet sample outlets, independent savings banks and insurance agents. On to the pothole pocked side streets where the awful, vinyl-sided
house converted to a “professional building” was king. And there were a lot of kings. At any given time, some kid was being dragged against his will into a “professional building” for his booster shot, or to have the wires on his braces tightened.

Fluorescent lit rooms were filled with former hairdressers with pluck who now analyzed the urine of old people for a living. This was the life we were striving for? We couldn’t understand how they did it, and yet they did. Thousands of them. We talked at length about there having to be another way of living, and how we’d rather die than sell out.

A tallboy of bewilderment, disgust, anxiety and a bit of admiration did its dirty numbers inside me as we’d drive past the vibrant South Shore Blood Laboratory, or Dynamic Actuaries, Inc. Past their anemic, spare-every-expense landscaping and dog-shit brown strips of lawn. The idea of working in such a place for twenty-five years was enough to make anyone consider suicide. And the traffic was murder. Bumper to bumper every morning and every evening. People were moving to the area in record numbers. It made no sense to any of us who were dying to get out.

“We should just blow off all this shit and drive out West … right now.” It would take me some years to take that good advice. I had just seen
Easy Rider
for the first time. At that point both Ray and I knew his shitty
car would be lucky to make Hartford. And neither of us wanted to end up in Hartford.

We’d slow down at the ranch-style house converted to a professional building where my older sister’s dentist, Dr. Aranow—in his mid thirties—had recently killed himself. He locked the doors and windows after the last patient left. He gassed himself silly with nitrous oxide, set the waiting room on fire and blew his head off with a shotgun while seated in the dental chair.

For several months after his suicide, the house and yard were left untouched. Overgrown tufts of yellowing crabgrass dominated the yard and cracks in the walkway. Internal fire and water damage caused the scorched outer clapboards to bow and lift from their joists, leaving the house looking like a poorly constructed, failing boat.

Ray thought the back yard might be a cool place to hang out at night and drink. It was going to be summer in a matter of weeks. Drinking season. Our alcohol intake would increase in direct proportion to the temperature, peak by the middle of August, and taper off by Labor Day. Finding a reliable buyer and a safe outdoor drinking spot (and by that I mean safe from the police) were top priorities. Virtually every kid on the South Shore who has ever been drunk has been so in a field or in the woods or near the beach.