Smiths' Meat is Murder Read Free Page B

streams of rainwater pour down around us …
when she cycles by …
Her smokes soggy, contaminated, she says, and her lips kiss the air. I offer her one of mine …
there go all my dreams …
She holds it in her fingers like the bone of a saint. Raises it to her lips, wordless. Her eyes so giant, I look at each individually. I light her smoke …
is she still there or has she gone away? …
She smokes. She blinks. We fuck.
    What I felt for her then was real and big enough to eclipse the memory of an old dead friend, and I refused to hate myself for it. Danny who? When she sat behind me, it frustrated me that I couldn’t see her. It had a physically painful quality to it. I did some frantic calculations that verified what I already knew: There were not many minutes left in the semester. I’d have to work quickly and efficiently, though I wasn’t really sure what that meant.
    Allison knew I was alive, but that was about it, and it troubled me no end. I wanted to stick myself withsomething sharp, the way a dermatologist lances a painful cyst. I wanted to loosen my own teeth for her. Instead I listened endlessly to ‘Reel Around the Fountain’ and withdrew into the reliable and disturbing comfort of longing.
    * * *
    MTV was already in full swing by ’85, but my family didn’t have cable TV. I’d seen it a couple times at my cousin’s house and was transfixed. It was intoxicating. It was numbing. And it was hot, hot, hot. But my old man said there was no way in hell he was going to pay good money to watch bad television and that was the end of that. So I pined away in my room at night with a purple black light on the job, listening to The Smiths and blowing tidy pillars of cigarette smoke into the back yard. I did my best to draw pictures of Allison, but I had—and still have—zero artistic ability.
    Some nights in bed I’d fire up a transistor radio (manufactured in the shape of Popeye’s head) in hopes of hearing ‘How Soon is Now’ and thus feeling vaguely connected to the outside world. Radio was only a few synapses away from brain dead, but they kept the poor vegetable on life support for years. Once in a great while, a station on the North Shore called Y95 wouldplay my favorite song or ‘Hand in Glove’, or something by The Cure or New Order.
    The problem was Y95’s transmitter was so weak—powered by a monkey pedaling a miniature bicycle—that its broadcast was always going in and out. It was as frustrating as anything I can remember. I’d micro tune like a madman, trying to catch a clear sounding verse or chorus before the song ended. And if I missed the song I tried to pick up the disc jockey’s back announcement. It was that important to connect. To this day, even the slightest bit of static peppering a broadcast makes me anxious.
    But tweaking the Popeye transistor caused Y95’s signal to vanish completely, and that of a powerful mainstream station would paint over the smaller station’s bandwidth. I suffered through countless surprising flourishes of Wang Chung and Phil Collins and Van Halen and that ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ song. The one about riding on the freeway of love, man, that was deplorable. Pure fucking misery.
    That summer the little monkey died in a hostile corporate takeover, and Y95 went away for good.
    I had a twelve-inch black and white TV made by a company called Admiral. If I moved the TV to the northernmost point of my bedroom and taped a disfigured wire coat hanger to the end of the antenna, andif the weather was just right then maybe, just maybe, I could pick up a grainy broadcast music video station called V68. It was like I was trying to receive secretly coded messages from the French Underground. Actually, Polish Underground is more accurate: I discovered V68 by accident one Friday night. I was twisting the VHF dial looking for a movie with lots of implicit sex, when I happened upon the video for ‘Minus Zero’ by Lady Pank. They were driving around in a white