Smiths' Meat is Murder (8 page)

Ray was a good guy, and he was right, about a lot of things. Besides, I’d committed Allison’s number to memory weeks ago.

The next morning around ten, I called Allison’s house but her mother said she was still sleeping. I apologized obsequiously for calling so early. Her mother was really friendly and said it was okay because she’d been
up for hours and that Allison, “Well, Allison could sleep through an atomic bomb.” I made a mental note that Allison was a heavy sleeper. I would have thought the opposite. I left my name and number and hung up feeling like a weight had been shifted off of me and onto Allison. It was her move now.

I went to my room, cranked up the cassette player and plugged in. Figuring out the bass part to ‘What She Said’ had been giving me a lot of trouble. I knew I was biting off too much with this one, but I didn’t see myself as having much choice. I had absolutely no idea when (or if) Charles, the gay track star virtuoso pianist, was going to call me to practice with his band. I wanted to be ready so that I could seem nonchalant, even a bit aloof when he did call.

I had a cheap copy of a Fender Precision bass and a shoe-box sized Ross guitar practice amp. I’d bought the pair for a hundred and fifty bucks from this neighborhood flunky kid who had supposedly gotten his shit in a pile and joined the navy. After a few weeks of intense rock star bashing, I blew the six-inch speaker to shreds, so I had to play without an amp, sitting down, hunched over the bass, with my ear pressed against the body of the guitar. It wasn’t ideal, but in order to make any sound, I was forced to fret the notes more precisely, and my left hand got strong fast. My right hand was already plenty strong.

But I quickly figured out (while on a sneaky reconnaissance mission to reclaim some of my favorite shirts) that my sister Kathryn’s boom box (a Confirmation present from her sponsor) could be used as an amplifier. When she wasn’t around I’d grab it from her room and abuse it. At the most, it was built to handle a vocal microphone at low volume. I punished the fragile circuitry and nipple-sized speakers with countless damaging hertz of low end. I knew I was taking a serious risk because she loved her New Edition, Lisa Lisa and Billy Ocean as much as I loved The Smiths. If anything happened to that boom box, she’d cut me dead in my sleep.

I was pretty excited after talking to Allison’s mother. I knew I had made an okay impression on her with my manners and all, and I hoped she’d tell Allison that I seemed like a nice kid. All of this new positive energy filled me with confidence and focus, more than I’d felt in a while. In about twenty minutes I figured out the tricky coda of the song and blasted through it at least ten times.

I had a great tolerance for repetition when it came to playing bass. It bordered on addiction. I could play the same part for hours on end, and did, many, many times. A lot of musicians I know are the same way. We love to hear ourselves play and play and play to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. It drove my
mother berserk, and she hated The Smiths which made it that much worse.

“Not those Smiths again,” she’d moan. She always called them Those Smiths. Whenever she talked about something distasteful (or in some cases with affection), she replaced the definite article with a demonstrative adjective. A reformed, innovative grammarian. Those Smiths, that Joyce, this Kiley, and so on. I once caught her singing the chorus to ‘How Soon is Now’, and when I pointed it out to her, she was irritated with me for getting it stuck in her head. Her diction swung well into the camp of the inventive. But she was much too caring and understanding to do me in with an endless loop of Anne Murray’s ‘Snowbird’ or a Jim Nabors medley. She could have, very easily.

The day I figured out the walking bass part to ‘Rusholme Ruffians’, I played it non-stop from three in the afternoon to six at night. My mother, God bless her, tried everything short of clocking me with a cast iron pan to get me to come sit down for dinner. No reaction from me except ba-boom, boom, boom, boom, ba-boom, boom, boom, boom. Finally, she got wise. Instead of even trying to talk to me like a human being, she just turned the tuning pegs on the bass so that the notes went especially sour. It was a good gag, and I’ve used it on more than one bassist.

So, on the morning I called Allison, I was torturing my immediate family with the coda of ‘What She Said’ when my mother stuck her head in my room without knocking. I guess since she heard me playing bass, she figured there was no feasible way I could be jerking off. (I was progressing as a player, but was not that good. Besides, partaking in both activities simultaneously was a magic trick that could only be executed properly by hair metal musicians, and in public.) She startled me a little, and I stopped playing before she spoke.

“There’s a phone call for you,” she said, secretary-smooth, handing me the hallway extension with her hand covering the mouthpiece. Then she added in a whisper, “I think it’s a young lady.”

I was so nervous I moved to the door still wearing my bass. In two steps I ran out of slack in the cable so that it went taught and dragged the boom box-serving-as-amplifier off my desk and crashing onto the floor. The Smiths were still blaring full-blast from the tape recorder. In a flash of genius I figured Allison would think I was extra cool if she heard The Smiths screaming over the phone. Morrissey had just begun the second verse of ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ when I grabbed the phone from my mother, physically shoved her out into the hallway, and slammed the door shut. This was the real deal, and I would need absolute privacy,
concentration and intensity to come across as suave to Allison.

“Hello,” I said with a slight interrogative inflection, barely able to hear my own voice over the music. I stuck my middle finger in my other ear. There was a short pause, then a soft, high-pitched voice piped up:

“Um, hi… um, I can’t hear you over the music.”

“Sorry. Hang on a second.” I reached over and pressed the stop button. The last snare hit echoed around the plaster walled room and died like applause choked off by the house lights. “Allison? Hey, sorry about that. I was just practicing playing bass to
Meat is Murder.”

“That’s okay,” her tired, telephonic voice squeaked. “But this isn’t Allison.”

“It isn’t? Then who is it?”

“It’s Paul.”

“Who the fuck is Paul?” I figured it was a prank call, and I was a little irritated that this Paul, Dick or Harry—or whoever the fuck it was—was tying up the line, cock-blocking Allison’s return call to me. This was way back in the Carboniferous Era, centuries before call waiting, caller ID, and the indispensable star sixty-nine.

“You know, Paul? From school? With CF? Cystic Fibrosis? The library? Paul?”

It took me a few seconds to connect the voice with the person. It was as if I had taken a trip into the most
remote part of the Amazon rain forest only to stumble, by pure chance, upon my pee wee ice hockey coach. It messed with my head.

“Oh … hey, Paul. What’s going on, man … I mean … do you know who this is?”

“Yeah, I called you, remember?” He started laughing a little and I joined him.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I mean, I was expecting someone else. Anyone else, really,” I said. There was a short awkward silence, then I asked, “I mean … what do you want?”

The tit mouse on the other end filled his heartbreaking lungs and said:

“I want to play guitar in your band.”

* * *

There was a rumor that The Smiths were tentatively scheduled to play at the Orpheum Theater in Boston some time before September. Just the possibility of them coming to our city offered a shallow crag in the rocks into which I desperately worked my fingers. For the average Joe, getting tickets to a show this anticipated and rare would prove to be nearly impossible. But I had Ray, and he was already in motion.

In his best Cary Grant, Ray said over the phone line, while assorted pneumatic drills and wrenches whizzed
in the background, “I’ll ask my little Powder Puff if she’d like a ride, and I’ll have her get on it, pronto. You know what I mean?”

“You’re sick, you know that?” I said in mock disgust. Then asked without missing a beat, “Do you really think she can get tickets for us?”

“You know what happens when you grease a wheel, my friend?” he asked. “It turns.”

Ray was a pro at getting tickets for shows because all through high school he worked stacking tires in the automotive service center at the Sears in the mall. Sears also had a Ticket Outlet on the second floor, next to the optical department, and Ray sometimes used to drive one of the ticket salesgirls home at night. Sometimes more than that, but he never got specific. Her name was Debbie and she was so pale-skinned and naturally platinum blonde, she looked like she’d ignite if she got too close to a naked light bulb. Ray said that Debbie was only one or two shades darker than a legally certifiable albino, and he wondered if she was thus entitled to a grant of some kind.

My summer job was not so glamorous. The only place in my town where a kid without a car could get a job was at the Snip and Save Supermarket. My older brother Jerry got me a job there as a bagboy with probationary status. He started at the SS when he was in high
school. He moved up to the produce department during his first summer vacation from college. Now he was twenty-three, a full-time mechanical engineer during the week, and still pulled two shifts as weekend produce manager for extra cash. A real go-getter. And a sweetheart to boot.

“You better not fuck up or my ass will be grass. And if my ass is grass, your ass is going to be twice as grass,” Jerry lectured in front of a full-length mirror in our upstairs hallway, fitting his green produce manager’s smock over his pressed shirt and tie. It was hard to believe he had been granted access to any of his brain, let alone so much of it. In his case, book smart was the new stupid.

“God, this music is too fucking miserable for me. Instead of Morrissey, you should listen to Morrison or Clapton.” He bit his lower lip, looked constipated and shredded two beats of a searing air guitar lead. “And really, how can anybody be gay and celibate at the same time?” he asked, sifting through his pocket change and tossing each of the coins into one of four jars decorated with magazine cut-outs of his dream car: a Monte Carlo Grand National.

“I don’t know, Jerry. How do you do it?”

“Asshole,” he said, and fired a nickel that I caught after it hit the left lens of my eyeglasses. I raised the
nickel like the Eucharist so that he could see it, then I tucked it away, deep in the front pocket of my lightweight work slacks.

“Come and get it, sailor,” I said with an over the top, coquettish squeal. Deep down Jerry was a first class omniphobe. He wasn’t exactly what I’d call a hateful person, just genuinely terrified of venturing out from the false safety of his self-imposed routine. It made him not so pleasant to be around. But he was my brother, and mostly I felt bad for him. That didn’t stop me from breaking his balls at every opportunity.

“I want that back, asshole,” he demanded, but I was already out the door, wagging my ass and swinging my smock overhead in victory.

My smock was a shade of brown that signified my lowly position at the Snip and Save, and it absorbed the sun’s rays like the vinyl Landau rooftop on a Cutlass Supreme. I always waited until the last possible second to put it on. Same went for my shirt and tie. I’d stroll up bare-chested to the SS five minutes before my shift started, dress in front of the huge plate glass windows and count the frowns within. I’d just spent my eleventh year in a Catholic school uniform, and now this. And for what?

I was making about three-fifty an hour, as in three dollars and fifty cents. My plan was to quit the minute I saved enough for a new (used) Peavey TNT bass
amplifier and two tickets to see The Smiths (one for me, and one to bait the hook on which I hoped to catch Allison). I estimated my sentence at the SS to be about one hundred shifts long.

Until then I’d schlep back and forth from the frigid store to the blazing parking lot for six hours at a whack. All the while a front-of-store manager named O’Ha-loran (we called him O’Himmler) watched me and the other pubes (as the senior baggers called us) and scribbled comments on his clipboard as if he was scouting potential NCAA water boys. A pube had to work for at least six weeks and accumulate no more than three red checks next to his name to be guaranteed a regular spot on the schedule. Some people wanted to be part of the team so badly. I just wanted a finite amount of cash.

Tuesday mornings were the absolute worst at the Snip and Save. That was the day two school buses from the Laurel Park Retirement Community off-loaded all ninety of the residents for their weekly shop. It was so depressing I once volunteered to mop up a puddle of human blood drawn by an overzealous automatic door just to shorten my participation in “The Geritol Run” as it was affectionately called.

As if besieged by a dwindling but determined river of cod liver oil, the store was flushed clean of all prune juice, Moxie, overripe fruit, widow-sized jars of assorted
condiments and the like. Sure, some of the old people were cute as hell, and I believe the elderly deserve to be cut all the slack in the world, but when you’re sixteen, miserably in love and miserable, there are only so many times (and it’s a lot fewer than ninety) you can refrain from shaking someone senseless when they ask, “Hot enough for ya?”

Besides the microscopic hourly wage I was bringing in, three things made the job barely tolerable: 1) a mini, flesh-colored earphone that let me secretly listen to music in one ear while the customers babbled about God only knows in the other. 2) Lobster Kiley, the future drug czar of the Snip and Save, a “legacy” like myself, was miraculously offered a probationary pube bagging job. 3) A twenty-eight year old checkout girl named Veronica, who supposedly liked to teach younger, inexperienced guys about the proper way to screw. (Whether it was true or not, I didn’t even know the wrong way to screw, thus was never called in for mandatory reeducation).

Music, a cheap buzz and the potential for unbridled (or bridled) sex: three acceptable reasons for a teenager to keep a shitty job. All of those things, and one time I spotted a girl I used to know in grammar school. She was a year older than me, holding hands with some landscaping dude as they moved across the parking lot toward me. She was wearing a baby in one of those
padded, nylon chest harnesses. They were all smiling, even the kid. I hadn’t spoken to her in over three years, and I didn’t want her to see me like that, in my brown smock and name tag, working for tips. I hid my face, bent over like I was going to tie my shoes which were black penny loafers.