Meat is Murder
by Joe Pernice
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Here's an excerpt:
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 hadâ??and still haveâ??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 â??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 would play my favorite song or â??Hand in Glove', or something by the Cure or New Order.
The problem was Y95's transmitter was so weakâ??powered by a monkey pedaling a miniature bicycleâ??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 â??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, and if 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 â??Minus Zero' by Lady Pank. They were driving around in a white battle tank I later found out was actually pink. I was looking at the black and white world.
I saw the video for â??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.
