Smiths' Meat is Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

slipped in beneath my bedroom door.
    For months after the suicide pep rally, my friend Ray would greet me in person with some variation of the following: “I want you to have my car. I don’t need it where I’m going.” To which I’d reply with as straight a face as I could keep, removing the watch from my wrist, “Here, take this. It used to mean a lot to me, but now … I don’t know. I’d like you to have it. Something to remember me by.” Then we’d laugh until we were choking and bond over references to obscure Borscht Belt comedians we knew about only because we had siblings who were much older than us. Once he telephoned to say he had just begun the lengthy self-basting process necessary to ensure a successful immolation, and that there was a large parcel of cash (unmarked, except for my name) in the trunk of his malignant Dodge Dart Swinger.
    * * *
    My eyes were really starting to go bad that spring, and to be honest, I was afraid to get behind the wheel of acar. Though I liked the freedom that driving represented, I was almost nineteen (an old man by American standards) when I got my license. Until then I bummed rides off of friends or slummed it on the bus.
    In the mornings I’d get off at the Braintree station if it was before eight thirty and wait for Ray to cruise through the “bus only” lane as a matter of course and pick me up. Then we’d stop for take-out coffee, and we’d smoke, fantasize about girls (though I confess, I did most of the talking) and listen to tapes. Ray had an eight-track player in his car with one of those converters that lets you play normal cassettes. He was a total freak for The Smiths and The Clash, and it’s his fault for making me the same. Actually, he was a card carrying Anglophile when it came to music, but The Smiths and The Clash, in that order, ruled all.
    Compared to where I lived, Manchester, England seemed exotic. I’ve been lucky enough to go to Manchester a few times, and compared to where I grew up, it
is
exotic. (My town has the dubious honor of producing a famous hazardous waste dump and a Republican cabinet member.)
    Ray and I would navigate the boring streets of middle class suburbia, past the early-70s pre-fab storefronts that were home to tax preparers, carpet sample outlets, independent savings banks and insurance agents. On to the pothole pocked side streets where the awful, vinyl-sidedhouse converted to a “professional building” was king. And there were a lot of kings. At any given time, some kid was being dragged against his will into a “professional building” for his booster shot, or to have the wires on his braces tightened.
    Fluorescent lit rooms were filled with former hairdressers with pluck who now analyzed the urine of old people for a living. This was the life we were striving for? We couldn’t understand how they did it, and yet they did. Thousands of them. We talked at length about there having to be another way of living, and how we’d rather die than sell out.
    A tallboy of bewilderment, disgust, anxiety and a bit of admiration did its dirty numbers inside me as we’d drive past the vibrant South Shore Blood Laboratory, or Dynamic Actuaries, Inc. Past their anemic, spare-every-expense landscaping and dog-shit brown strips of lawn. The idea of working in such a place for twenty-five years was enough to make anyone consider suicide. And the traffic was murder. Bumper to bumper every morning and every evening. People were moving to the area in record numbers. It made no sense to any of us who were dying to get out.
    “We should just blow off all this shit and drive out West … right now.” It would take me some years to take that good advice. I had just seen
Easy Rider
for the first time. At that point both Ray and I knew his shittycar would be lucky to make Hartford. And neither of us wanted to end up in Hartford.
    We’d slow down at the ranch-style house converted to a professional building where my older sister’s