Smiths' Meat is Murder Read Free

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 throughit) 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-turnbrainward 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