Smiths' Meat is Murder (9 page)

I could hear their constant giggles and coochie-coo noises get louder and go quiet as they passed without slowing down, as if I was nothing more than an empty shopping cart someone had berthed against a lightpole. And even though I was doing my best to avoid them—not the other way around—it made me feel so lonely and out of place I stayed down by my shoes and cried. There were so many terrible things that could happen to them. Any number of ruinous events could nullify all of their best attempts. Break them apart like a saltine. Their family, with a combined age of thirty-five and some change, could tumble like a house of Christening thank-you cards. What made me most sad was that I doubted I’d ever have so much to lose.

* * *

Because Paul was a sickly bookworm, I associated limits and frailty of all kinds with him and just assumed he didn’t know how to play guitar very well. In my book, thin and flimsy as it was, Paul’s failing pulmonary health
and musical ability had to be similar in quality. There was no way he played any differently than he breathed: with great difficulty and no obvious natural talent. To think so was presumptuous of me, I know. As much as it bothers me to admit, I was after all (and still am), my brother Jerry’s brother.

“How long you been playing?” I asked. I almost said, How long have you been playing
guitar?
But it sounded cooler, more like I was an insider, to say it the other way.

“I don’t know, about twelve, thirteen years,” he said, in a voice that sounded like it belonged to a person no older than seven. Thirteen years? Holy shit! I no longer mistook the smallness of his voice for weakness of any kind.

“No way, really?” It was impossible for me to conceal my surprise and admiration. I had been playing bass—two strings easier than guitar—for less than twelve months. I didn’t know anybody who had been playing anything for that long. “Who do you sound like?”

“Anybody, everybody I guess. If I hear something once or twice I can pretty much play it back. Same with piano and flute. But I don’t imagine you’re looking for a flute player?” he asked, trying to size me up this time.

“No flute,” I laughed.

“Yeah, I don’t think flute has any place in popular music. Like Jethro Tull or that solo in ‘California Dreaming’—some producer deserved to be executed for
that one … the player too.” We both started to laugh. “Hey, I have one for you. How do you get two oboe players to play in tune?” he asked. I had only a vague idea as to what an oboe was, but I could feel that it was still going to be pretty funny. “I don’t know, how?”

“Shoot one of them.” We both started to laugh hard. And then cough hard. Paul’s cough sounded much more productive and serious than my own because it was. I could hear him between coughing spells spit repeatedly into a tissue or towel of some kind. It scared me and shut me up. I listened to him helplessly over the phone for at least five minutes and could only imagine his reddened face, and his throat with its calamitously tested root system of veins and arteries. The broken blood vessels in his teary eyes from the fits.

“Are you okay?” I asked when he’d calmed down to a point where he seemed able to talk.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he said shaken up and exhausted. “You know,” he added, working hard to displace some of the fluid in his lungs with air, “you shouldn’t smoke.”

* * *

Later that afternoon, after watching the Red Sox take the first half of a Saturday double-header, I collected some of the leftover nerve I’d mustered to call Allison,
and dialed Charles’s number. By the name listed in the phone book, I figured Charles was his father’s namesake. When I called the number, the jazzy, irritated-sounding voice on the machine accompanied by a distorted electric piano was Charles’s:

“Hey cats, if you’re not looking for Charles, you’ve called the wrong joint. If you are looking for Charles, then bingo! This is Charles’s line, but Charles will be down on the sunny Cape, boo-hoo, until after the Fourth of July weekend. How ’bout giving him a try then?
Mi dispiace. Ciao.”

I hung up without leaving any message. If that was Charles playing keyboards on the answering machine, then I was definitely way out of my league as a player. And if Paul was as good a guitarist as he said he was, then I was way out of that league too. I hoped I wasn’t so far out of Allison’s league, though it seemed like we weren’t even playing the same sport. All of these leagues I was way out of. In a burst of anxious energy, I dialed Allison’s number and hung up after the second ring.

Paul said his father had a tape to tape recorder on his stereo system. (The term
stereo system
conjured up images of racks of exotic components hard-wired together and stacked higher than the Prudential Building.) So on Sunday morning I left for his house so he could make his own copy of
Meat is Murder,
and we could talk about maybe playing some music together. Paul
said he didn’t really know The Smiths (which meant he didn’t know them at all), but he would after a couple listens. I was a little skeptical, not so much about his ability to play, but about his taste—which I knew nothing about. I feared he might be into Corey Hart or something like that and want to play me his favorite cuts.

He offered to go out and buy the record himself, but I was kind of curious to witness his most enviable skill and to get an idea of what he was about. I also think a large part of me—and I’m not saying it was an especially healthy part or that I even realized what I was up to then—wanted to go see something sad so I’d feel better about myself, or worse, or at least different. Plus, I was losing my mind in East Bumfuck waiting for the telephone to ring.

Paul lived in the same town by the ocean as Denise and her three friends who drove into the pharmacy. Most of the people who lived there were loaded, probably in every sense of the word. Young kids with old money in heavyweight sweatshirts with crests from Williston and Deerfield experimenting with weed behind the wheels of Jaguars and Jeeps. Muscular, gleaming Chevy Suburbans pulling sailboats and motorboats with names like Irish Row-ver and T-Bill through the narrow streets that were engineered to keep road speeds to a quaint minimum.

Sprawling, impeccably weather-beaten Cape Cod mansions with emerald-green, be-gated lawns that man-handled
the eroding dunes back into the ocean. The town center boasted one of the first automatic teller bank machines anywhere, and a stretch of private, colonial style homes preserved and painted white per order of a town ordinance. It was the kind of place where you could spend a buck and a half on a cup of gourmet coffee, even back in ’85. Gasoline cost fifty cents more a gallon than it did in my town a mere twenty miles away.

I’ve learned that the more money there is collected in a single town, the worse its public transportation system is. Why would it be any different? Everyone who belonged there had enough bread to own cars, and they certainly didn’t want to make it any easier for anyone from the outside to trespass on their commons or in their ocean. To get to Paul’s house I’d have to take a thirty-minute stop-and-go bus ride to the Weymouth Landing Station, then wait around for the number forty bus. Take that to the end of the line (a twelve-mile trip), then walk about a mile.

I hit the first part of my trip just right and saw the Weymouth Landing bus coming my way a few minutes after I’d reached the stop. There were about two hundred churches in my hometown, and back then people (excluding myself) still went regularly. Every show was sold out. One after another. You’d think they were giving away cash or coupons for free oil changes.

If you happened to get caught in the changeover traffic from one service to another, forget it. A rent-a-cop would ford the street, stop road traffic with his gloved hand and keep you there until every car exited the church lot. It could take years. The only good thing about being stopped was seeing all of the mint granny-mobiles that seemed to travel there through time. One expected them, blue-haired pilots and all, to take loft and reenact the Ascension before the entire congregation.

I figured it was about twenty after twelve, which meant most of the services—the Catholic ones at least—were at the point right after the gospel, when the priest gives the homily, better known as the half-time speech. People would be nailed to their pews for at least another half hour. Excellent news for me. I dropped a sixty-five cent indulgence into the fare meter and left Golgotha like a bat out of hell.

The next leg I wasn’t so lucky. By the time the number forty bus pulled up to the stop at the Weymouth Landing Station, I had been waiting for about an hour, and was just finishing up my second listen of the album. The battery meter on my walkman showed plenty of juice left for the rest of the trip. The station was near desolate, par for the course for a Sunday at noon, especially in the summer.

I was glad to finally get on the bus. Some kids with short cropped hair and long rat tails down their necks
were giving me some dirty looks from within a sullen-looking mom and pop pizza joint at the station. They knocked on the window a few times from their table to get my attention, and when I looked, a red-faced giant in an Izod cardigan sweater and designer sweatpants was smiling at me like a psychopath while he flipped me the bird with both hands. The other three clones laughed with their mouths full of chewed pizza.

I gave myself a quick look up and down. I was wearing straight legged jeans (pegged and cuffed), an XTC English Settlement T-shirt, Allison’s Echo pin, and a pair of black Converse high tops. Nothing too outrageous or attention grabbing. And that morning I skipped the hair gel, figuring an increase in hair volume would increase the likelihood of me finding myself in exactly this kind of situation. As far as my four pals were concerned, I was wearing wooden clogs and a French maid’s outfit.

I lit a smoke, looked away and counted cars drifting past the entrance to the station. I knew all it would take was for the right hero to suggest they go kick the shit out of me, and it would be lights out for you know who. But for no good reason I could tell, they let me off the hook. Which I guess made sense, because it was for no good reason they seemed to want to kill me. A lot gets done in the name of no good reason. I had been fifty-fifty, half-certain the ringleader was going to curb me or worse while his toadies served up a few of their own
for good measure. I stepped up into the empty bus and felt genuinely relieved when it lurched forward and I heard the doors meet snugly behind me. I thought about the pre-selected victim who never knew the serial killer held her in his sights, only to change his mind just like that, moments before the attack, as if the moonlight instructed him to feed elsewhere.

Morrissey had just begun lamenting in ‘Nowhere Fast’ when I took a seat and saw through the cloudy, scratched plexiglass window, the ringleader standing among his comrades in front of the pizza joint, yelling something in my direction. Then he hyper extended the waistband of his sweatpants with one hand and gripped his ginger-haired trunk with the other and began his salute. Even at my angriest or most frustrated, his farewell gesture of choice was one I had never seriously considered using. I mean, if he had shown me his ass to kiss, well that I could sort of understand. What did he want me to do? Blow him? Watch him come in front of his buddies? I knew it had nothing to do with me, but it was still a drag.

The bus let me off in the center of the town right near a decorative iron bench and a statue of some local historical figures who had been instrumental in driving out the Redcoats. There was a curious lack of statues celebrating local figures who had been instrumental in driving out the natives. It seemed like the only thing
to do was to crank the volume of my tape of British music in protest. Even though I was the only one who could hear it, I felt like I was doing something important.

I had only been to the town a couple of times before in my life, despite its close proximity to where I lived. When I was about nine, Danny’s father took Danny, his brother Patrick, and I to a semi-pro exhibition hockey game somewhere around there. I remember changing my mind minutes after telling my mother I’d go. She said I was going, and threatened to slap me silly if I made a scene of any kind. (I have to make a note here: I was never once hit by my parents. The threat of violence was always enough.)

In the end I had a pretty okay time. But during the drive over, I remember being so sad and quiet in the back seat of the giant car. It was winter, and already pitch black at four o’clock. Danny’s father chain smoked with the windows closed and the heat turned up high. Whenever Danny or anyone else asked me a question or made a comment, I said nothing. The whole way there I kept my head pressed against the dewy window like a Brontë character while all kinds of lights sprayed their signals on the icy, unfamiliar roads.

I have to admit, as much as the visible monetary wealth and obvious order of the place disgusted me, it felt good to finally get off the stuffy bus and breathe the ocean air instead of humid diesel fumes. I thought
about how the masturbating sociopath had shaken me more than I had let myself believe. After a few deep breaths, I sat down on the shaded veteran bench—dedicated to the town’s World War One dead—and lit a smoke.

Looking over the water at an armada of moored pleasure boats rocking in unison, I wished it was winter and I was going to a hockey game with Danny and his family. Or that Allison was sitting there with me, teasing me, trying to Bogart our last smoke. Instead I was alone. Traveling anywhere, even a short distance away, always made me extra lonely. I couldn’t make it through ‘Well I Wonder’ because it was too true. I gave the tape a burst of fast forward. The words to sad songs are always harder to take when there’s no one else around.

I was overcome by a sense of my life getting shorter with every breath I took—even the ones that didn’t pass through a cigarette. I thought I could feel myself dying at the cellular level as I sat there on a bench dedicated to dead people, on my way to see a kid who wouldn’t survive the summer. The moment could have been richer, if not happier: maybe kissing Allison’s cheek, playfully debating which Smiths record was better, enjoying the natural rhythm of the waves breaking on the beach, holding hands and making fun of every preppy asshole who looked at us cross-eyed. I wondered if Allison enjoyed sitting around quietly tearing preppy ass-holes
down a couple pegs, and other meaningful things. Those are the riches of the poor.