Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (19 page)

I still had the Kool butt I stole from Paul Westerberg’s ashtray. I took it home. The next day I mailed it to the girl in Nova Scotia. She wrote back, “It stinks to high heaven.” Clearly, she and I were not meant to be. But the Replacements and I? Meant to be.
So
meant to be.

1986

 

 

 

 

You know the scene at the end of
St. Elmo’s Fire
where everybody’s saying good-bye to Rob Lowe at the bus station? Rob Lowe takes Judd Nelson’s arm, looks him in the eye and whispers, “Don’t let her go.” Judd hangs his head, because he knows that Rob Lowe is right (as he always is) and that he needs to hold on tight to Ally Sheedy, even if she did just bang Andrew McCarthy in the shower. That’s a beautiful moment.

Well, right now, think of me as Rob Lowe, urging you to cling to Ally Sheedy, or whatever she may happen to symbolize in your own life. (For me, Ally Sheedy represents the Taoist concept of “Wind over Fire,” but I’m not going to lay that on you now.)

We all have our Ally Sheedys, the things we cling to and do not leave behind at the bus station. All men have Ally Sheedys and mine is Stephen Patrick Morrissey. He has devoted his life and mine to making me a lamer, dumber, more miserable person. I can’t leave him behind, because I’ve tried, and yet he follows me everywhere I go. Six years on my trail? I should be so lucky to get off that easy.

The first Smiths album came out when I was eighteen, and it took me exactly eighteen seconds (that first “and you maaaade” swoop in “Reel Around the Fountain”) to decide this was my new favorite band in the history of the everythingverse. I was young and impressionable and hungry for guidance, and this guy knew everything.

Morrissey was my Mrs. Garrett, the house mother from
The Facts of Life
, a soothing adult figure giving me words of wisdom.

“Aw, Stephen Patrick . . . I’m a little depressed.”

“There’ll be blood on the cleaver tonight.”

“Excuse me?”

“You should never go to them. Let them come to you. Just like I do.”

“Wow! I never saw it that way, but you’re right!”

“I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving. England is mine and it owes me a living.”

“Gosh, me too, Stephen Patrick! But I have a problem. See, there’s this girl I like.”

“She wants it now and she will not wait. But she’s too rough and I’m too delicate.”

“I wish I could talk to her, but I don’t know how.”

“Pretty girls make graves.”

“They do? That’s terrible!”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t bother.”

“Thanks, Stephen Patrick! You’re the
best
!”

I cannot even begin to calculate how much truly terrible advice I got from Morrissey. In the endless
Tuesdays with Morrissey
conversations I had with him, in the privacy of my own overheated skull, he gave me a map to life, with all the arrows pointing in contrary directions. If he was Mrs. Garrett, I was happy to be his Blair, Tootie, Natalie and Jo combined.

“Nobody understands me, Stephen Patrick. Nobody but you!”

“People said you were easily led, and they were half right.”

“Wow! Will I ever make friends?”

“Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body?”

“Excuse me?”

“I dunno.”

“Oh. Me neither, Stephen Patrick! But what about that girl?”

“Love is just a miserable lie.”

“I love you, Stephen Patrick! You know
so much
about these things!”

His songs were a Magic 8-Ball of the damned. Whenever I would contemplate a really big adventure, like maybe washing my hair and putting on clean socks and leaving my room, Morrissey was there to talk me out of it and provide me with excellent reasons to keep hiding in my room where I belonged. When I did go out, to attend class or pick up a bag of Zeus Chips, I felt guilty for cheating on Morrissey with life.

He was perfect at expressing the fascistic demands on life that sensitive boys routinely make on the planet. I agreed completely. The failure of the rest of the world to arrange itself according to my moods, whims and desire to be recognized as a genius without actually doing anything—why, that was just proof that this was the wrong planet to be born on, and Morrissey knew I deserved better. Who were all these people I had to deal with every day? Why did I give them my valuable time? Girls, man. You try to talk to them, they just tell you things like “You’ve been in the house too long.”

Whenever I played him for other people, they usually winced and said, “Jesus, that man cannot sing.” This was proof of my sensitive ear, and proof that Morrissey and I only really understood each other. My mom thought he was cute, but that’s about it, although she really just liked his last name. “Morrissey!” she said. “He could be a Kerry boy!”

I was just going through the basic paradox of adolescence, which Mozz was remarkably candid about: I Want the One I Can’t Have, and It’s Driving Me Mad. One hundred percent of teenagers dream about making out, but they only dream about making out with 5 percent of other teenagers. This means our dreams and our realities are barely on speaking terms, so we look forward to making out with people who aren’t real, keeping us in a nearly universal state of teen frustration. It screws us up for the rest of our lives, as we keep hoping for the unattainable. It’s like if you planned your whole life around meeting Garfield, the cartoon cat. I do not know anyone who claims they want to own a cat someday, but they’re holding out for Garfield. If I met somebody who broke up with their cats every few weeks and said, “He just doesn’t eat lasagna” or “I don’t know, he was nice, but seldom seemed to be thinking sassy wisecracks about the slobbering dog,” I would have to assume this person was an idiot. Yet practically every teenager on earth channels their deepest sexual and romantic yearnings into fantasies.

Why are we designed this way? Who knows? I was in the flush of young manhood, with all the supposed vigor of youth, yet I was surly and hostile to everyone I met, including myself. I let my Walkman do the talking, and all it had to say was “Stay away.” I would have been this way even if I’d never heard the Smiths—but it was Morrissey who convinced me my most appalling qualities were heroic achievements. I guess that’s what rock stars are for.

I took being a Smiths fan seriously. I wondered what “vicars” or “moors” or “rusty spanners” were. I was mesmerized by the way Morrissey pronounced words such as “plagiarize,” “guts” and “delicate”—was that a Brit thing, or just him? I loved the song where Morrissey confessed he had a nightmare that lasted 20 years, 7 months, and 27 days. Assuming he meant his life, I calculated that I would turn this precise age on September 29, 1986, and eagerly awaited the revelations that would greet me. As it turned out, nothing happened that day at all, although I recall eating some frozen waffles.

I imagined myself as intimately familiar with the geography of Manchester, just from hearing Morrissey sing about it. The guy was sure into locations—under the iron bridge, the alley by the railway station, the fountain, the patio, the scholarly room, the darkened underpass, the YWCA—whew. That’s a lot of turf to cover, especially for a guy who never moved out of his mom’s house. Yet as Morrissey understood, my room was the scariest place of all.

I broke up with Morrissey after the second Smiths album,
Meat Is Murder
, came out in the spring of 1985, because he was just . . . too much of a jerk. I was desperate to get out of the humdrum town Morrissey had helped me build in my brain. My life had gotten totally grim—I just sat around my dorm room in a depressive stupor, too distracted by gloom to get any work done, too afraid to shave or answer the phone or go outside. Morrissey had turned into a lame self-parody, and so had I.

I have to admit, it was acrimonious. I went from idolizing the Smiths to despising them. Shit got ugly. I blamed them for all my problems—and if that didn’t make me a true Smiths fan, what could? Hell, Morrissey had taught me everything I knew about blaming my bad personality on people I’d never met. In a way, hating him was my sincerest possible act of fandom. Like Darth Vader light-sabering Obi-Wan Kenobi, I proved the douchebag student had become the douchebag master.

But I taped over
Meat Is Murder
with the new Madonna album,
Like a Virgin
. She was another pushy, needy egomaniac as untrustworthy as Morrissey, equally full of bullshit and bent on my destruction, but I had a feeling it was time to pay her brand of bullshit more attention. At least she had something to teach me that I didn’t already know. And even though I was disturbed by her worldview, I liked her songs a lot better than “Meat Is Murder.”

I started forcing myself to leave my room, going to indie rock shows, even when I didn’t feel like it. The club DJs would put on Smiths records, and the big-hair new-wave girls would perk up whenever their songs came on. What was wrong with these girls?

Then, just when I’d gone to all the trouble of purging the Smiths out of my system, they did something really offensive, which is they got good again. The first night my friend Martha played me
The Queen Is Dead
in her room, I was consumed with rage at the fact that it was so unmistakably, ridiculously great, and the fact that Morrissey was making fun of himself and doing a much better job of it than I could. Morrissey had beaten me to making all the changes I wanted to make—he was now funny, self-deprecating, apologetic about what an asshole he’d been to me, and (unfor-fucking-givable) blatantly trying to make me like him again. Bastard. I hated him more than ever, and decided to never listen to the Smiths again.

 

I was up in Boston for the weekend, kicking around the record shops on a cool summer evening. I ran into a guy I hadn’t seen since high school. Vincent had changed a lot. He was now bleaching his hair. He was out of the closet. He was obviously hitting the gym. And he was obviously a Smiths fan. It must sound pretty weird, but this was a time when the only people in the world who dressed like Morrissey were Morrissey fans, so we could spot one another pretty easily.

I was wearing a cardigan, and Vincent was wearing a lime green tank top, so it only took a minute for us to start chatting about the Smiths. We found somewhere to sit and eat french fries. The Red Sox game was on TV. We talked barely at all about high school, a great deal about gender ambiguity in “Still Ill,” and a little about the Red Sox. He wasn’t a baseball fan, so he was curious about what was happening on the field.

“This guy is Wade Boggs.”

“He looks like a charming man.”

“He is. He’s a singles-hitting third baseman who never knew his place.”

“Who’s that?”

“Dwight Evans, right field.”

“He is his mother’s only son, and he’s a desperate one.”

It was rare to spend a whole night talking about music with somebody I vaguely knew. He knew all these details about Morrissey I didn’t know—the way he revered James Dean, the name of the French actor on the cover of
The Queen Is Dead.
We debated whether Keats and Yeats versus Wilde was really a fair fight, given that Wilde idolized Keats and once kissed the soil on his grave in Rome.

“What the hell was that?”

“A double play,” I explained. “The runner on third got caught.”

“Will he get home?”

“He hasn’t got one.”

“Barbarism begins at home.”

We didn’t have many friends in common, so we ran out of gossip fast, but we just kept talking in our private Smiths language. By the end of the game, we’d discussed
The Queen Is Dead
to death, and I’d learned which members of the 1986 Red Sox were hot. Jim Rice grounded into a 6-4-3.

“That’s it?” Vincent asked. “It’s over.”

“It’s over.”

“In a way, it never really began.”

“But in my heart, it was so real.”

We shook hands at the train and traded addresses. We never wrote those letters and never ran into each other again. I thought it was strange to spend an evening having so much fun with someone I didn’t know so well, and to not hang out after that, because I was too young to know adult life is full of accidents and interrupted moments and empty beds you climb into and don’t climb out of. A few months later, the Red Sox lost the World Series.

One night that winter, I went to an indie rock show at the Grotto and the DJ played the new Smiths import twelve-inch “Ask.” I couldn’t believe Morrissey was admitting he was wrong about all that stuff he’d said a couple years earlier. He was coming right out and saying that people being nice to one another was a good thing, not a sign of weakness or moral corruption. I was stunned to hear it, partly because it was my old nemesis Morrissey saying it but partly because I was hoping it was a lie. It sounded like so much work, I didn’t know if I could handle it. But he made it sound like trying would be fun.

I was leaning against a wall in the Grotto, watching the usual big-hair new-wave girls do their usual “oooh, we love the Smiths!” dance, and completely failing to muster up any of the bile against them that had once made me feel so safe and strong and adult. I was just a kid leaning against a wall in a smelly rock club, enjoying some mediocre guitar bands, and avoiding eye contact with anyone. I had big problems, and Morrissey wanted me to know that, but he also wanted me to know that they were temporary problems. He and I had been through a lot together, but nothing would ever come between us again. And alas, nothing ever did. I haven’t been able to get rid of this guy since.

1986

 

 

 

 

Some things annoy you forever, and some disappear. It ’s impossible to predict. For instance, throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s, people made little quote marks with their fingers when they said something “clever” or “ironic.” God, that was annoying. I assumed it was going to bug the shit out of me forever. And then, for some reason, people stopped. If you’re under thirty, you have never made little quote marks with your fingers. When you watch
Say Anything
, you think it just looks silly when that girl tells Ione Skye, “I know we used to be [quote fingers] ‘ultra competitive.’” You probably wonder what ’s wrong with her.