Smiths' Meat is Murder Read Online Free

battle tank I later found out was actually pink. I was looking at the black and white world.
    I saw the video for ‘How Soon is Now’ within an hour of picking up the channel for the first time. I recognized the tremelo guitar but couldn’t believe it was actually happening. The Smiths on regular TV? I felt hopeful and victorious. Anyone who watched V68 at that moment had to be watching The Smiths. It was like my world went from black and white to a thousand shades of gray.
    For me, The Smiths were the great pasty white hope. R.E.M. ran a close second (until late ’86 when they lost me), but the Brits had an emotional edge. It was like Morrissey was given the key to the city of morbid, romantic angst. He tiptoed over a suspension bridge of glass blown by Marr and Co. It was pop music and ultra-melodic, with lyrics that penetrated my quietest fears with a diamond-tipped bummer.
    “Why don’t you listen to something else … like jazz? That Smith Family is so depressing,” offered my mother, simply doing her best to help, and I blamed her for it. “No wonder you don’t feel like getting up,” she added, leaving a basket of folded laundry inside my room without coming in. “Their poor mother and father.” I rolled over on the bed so that if she had anything else to say, it would be to my back. Even as I was acting like a hateful little shit, I knew I loved her, but I could not stop myself from excluding her from my life in a hurtful way. It’s endearing now, the way she thought The Smiths were a real dysfunctional family. But then I was embarrassed both for her and for myself.
    “They’re not related. It’s just a band name, like The Dead Kennedys,” I snapped (though at that time the Dead Kennedys were a band I knew by name alone), and closed the door hard in her face with my foot. “Besides, it makes me feel good.”
    She stood outside for a few seconds, then she sighed. I could hear her footsteps moving down the hardwood hallway until I jacked up the volume knob on the tape player. Once again, thankfully, I was alone. I took a pen and some paper from my bag and started to write Allison yet another note I would never send. I flipped the tape from front to back as I imagined her on her bed, listening to a girlfriend on the phone, with her feet against the wall.
    * * *
    Denise was a knockout right out of
The Last Picture Show.
She was so beautiful that she could drive a teenage boy (or a man) into a state of complete lovesick ruination from which he might never, and I mean never, recover. But Jesus H. Christ, our Lord and Salvation, took pity on me, and I felt no inklings of love for her. Instead I suffered over Allison, played bass guitar and was trying to put a band together. In a school as small as Saint Longinus (eight hundred inmates strong), a cool tidbit—like you’re in a band—travels fast. Even the rumor of possibly wanting to form a band carried with it a speck of social clout, and I took it.
    Denise was already known among the student body for being not only absolutely mint, but also an artist of notable talent. Her charcoals of a windswept Bryan Adams looked real enough to earn her first prize (four free movie tickets to the of-the-moment Jeff Bridges vehicle) in the all-school art fair. Anyway, her artistic ability and my fledgling musical ambitions made us kindred spirits in the eyes of the talentless. Therefore it was okay and kind of expected of us to have short conversations or wave to each other in passing. And though it never grew beyond that, we were known as friends bound by a shared insight into “some pretty deep shit”.
    She was from a wealthy beach town, known as the Irish Riviera, on the South Shore of Boston that was closer to Cape Cod than to Southie or Dorchester. Her suntans lasted well into October and resurfaced by the middle of March. At the start of April she and three of her hometown friends (a girl and two guys) killed themselves by crashing her Swedish car through a