I always believed rock stars knew more about everything than I did, so I was always relating them to religion. I pondered the existence of God because Billy Idol did. I questioned the connections between sexual freedom and spiritual concentration because Prince sang about them.
My beliefs basically bordered on idolatry. I was like the Israelites in the book of Exodus when they’re always getting caught with false idols, because God can’t turn his back without his people cheating on him with some Babylonian fish god or golden calf. The whole Bible read like one long episode of Three’s Company, with the people of God as Jack Tripper, always getting busted in a “two dates for the same night” episode, with God as the jealous cuckold dumping a drink over their heads.
Being a hermit was my vice. Not necessarily a bad vice; it protected me from other, more interesting vices I could have been discovering, which may have left more damage behind. I guess, strictly speaking, it was not even a vice in itself—more like what Catholics of my parents’ generation used to call a “habitual disposition,” a tendency to have trouble avoiding specific occasions of sin. I was in the market for some snazzier vices, some that would actually teach me something.
Lourdes was nothing like I pictured it. From books, I had imagined a peaceful solemn spot in the woods, a quiet little grotto where I could enjoy an unmediated, unspoiled moment with true divinity. Instead, it was like Las Vegas. There were neon lights everywhere, signs for motels and gift shops, stands selling special Lourdes candles. There were tourists everywhere. And I loved it. I loved how Las Vegas it was, and my main emotion was relief. I loved all the electric glare and all the noise. I loved hearing all the excitement in all the different languages and accents. It wasn’t so different from going to a hard-core all-ages show at a punk club on a Saturday afternoon, brushing up against other people’s bodies, letting go of my boundaries, trying not to get spooked about the push and rush of the crowd.
I didn’t dare to tell my family a thing about what an intense experience I was having. I held on to my candle and listened to the other pilgrims sing. I didn’t have any miracles to pray for—I wasn’t there looking for a cure or a sign. I just stared and tried to take it all in. I had shown up as a nineteen-year-old tourist who knew everything and suddenly I felt like I didn’t have the answer to a damn thing. It was frightening, obviously, but just like a punk rock show, it was also exciting.
I’ve tried to purge the religion from my system, and I’m always frustrated that I can’t. No matter how hard I have tried to pry that Catholic block out from inside my head, the best I can settle for is being a bad Catholic. It’s like Lou Reed said to Lester Bangs about drugs: “I make no bones about the fact that I take amphetamines. Any sane person would any chance they get. But I’m not in favor of legalization, because I don’t want all these idiots going around grinding their teeth at me.” That’s basically how I feel about religion. It’s a drug I abuse, but I don’t want to see it on the street.
This relationship is not a romance. God is not a girlfriend—she is a roommate’s girlfriend, one you put up with having around. You can break up with your roommate, and you can break up with your girlfriend, but you can’t break up with your roommate’s girlfriend, and even when you’re both through with the roommate, you can’t break up with each other. Long after you’ve moved out and they’re broken up, she will still be coming up to you at parties and saying hi. You will run into her at the library where she works or the bar where she pulls pints. You will not make a scene, because (it’s a fact) people are more polite to their roommates’ girlfriends than they are to their own girlfriends or their own roommates, for that matter. You will not give her the “You remind me of an apartment I wish I could forget I got trapped in” face, or the “I’ve heard you through the walls screaming the name of that deadbeat who skipped out on the phone bill” face.
You will, instead, feel vaguely sorry for her. She doesn’t know anyone else at this party. You are who she’s talking to and it’s not fair? Why you? Why her? Great, now she’s going to need a fucking ride home. She is suffering and she is maybe even bleeding and this is not at all your problem, so why won’t she learn to take care of herself for once?
That’s still basically my conception of God—a stoner chick who hasn’t eaten any solid food all weekend and won’t admit it. She makes disastrous decisions and says things she hasn’t thought through. When I try to commune with God, I’m basically talking to this stoner chick and trying to suggest politely that she eat something. “Hey, I’m really interested in what you’re saying right now, and I can’t wait to continue this discussion, so let me make you a sandwich and we can keep going, okay?”
When I was nineteen, I seriously thought that if I solved the problem of religion, I would get out of having to think about all this stupid stuff. It always makes me mad that I never solved it. I did not expect to still be furious about these things when I was an adult—but then, I didn’t expect to still be buying a new Madonna album every year either, and since Madonna was so fearless and rosary-flashing on the surface, yet so crucified and mortified on the inside, she probably still gets pissed about religion too. She even named her daughter Lourdes. Since Madonna, like so many other hell-raising teenage girls, has gone on in adulthood to be a bit of a religious bore, I guess she wasn’t as bold and independent as I thought she was at the time—she was probably just as fucked up and scared as I was. She must have taught me something about feeling a little pity for the gods. But it’s more likely she was feeling pity for me.
THE REPLACEMENTS
“Left of the Dial”
1986
The bus came every afternoon, right on time. Every forty minutes, the New Haven city bus rumbled down Whalley Avenue, and I could see it from my bedroom window. The billboard on the side had Judge Wapner’s face and the tag line “Today Is Judgment Day!” I never got on the bus—I just waited to see that billboard as it rolled past my block. Proof that the world never runs out of trivial omens for ominously inclined adolescents, which is another thing the world never runs out of. Omens like this were a dime a dozen, and I was the sucker with the pocketful of dimes.
I was living with a houseful of hippies in New Haven, sleeping on a futon in the corner of my friend Bob’s room. It was the first time I was living on my own, paying rent. It felt like a bold move into manhood. On Saturday afternoons, Bob and I would make Jell-O in the kitchen, and our housemates crowded around to watch. Bob stirred the liquid Jell-O as they stared into the bowl. It was the first time I began to get a vague sense of what drugs were.
It was a busted-up neighborhood with a lot of winos, who would hang around the corner liquor store and leave empty Thunderbird bottles around. One car down the street had a bumper sticker depicting a black Jesus who looked a lot like Prince. It read, MY PRINCE MAKES RAINBOWS . . . NOT PURPLE RAIN! My housemates mostly lounged on couches playing bongos or guitar while I made us all peanut butter sandwiches and wrote tortured love letters to a red-haired girl in Nova Scotia.
I had a job at the library shelving books, living on my daily bread of two Wawa dogs with extra cheese and a thirty-two-ounce Coke ($1.69). Every day around noon, I woke up, rolled over and pressed play on the boom box by my futon, drowsily contemplating the day ahead of me as the Replacements blasted out of the speakers. Before work, I would laze away the afternoon under a tree, reading St. Augustine’s Confessions. That spring, I had read Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist for the first time, and they had really shaken up my Irish Catholic applecart. I was full of questions about God and the universe. The answers, obviously, were all there in my boom box.
The Replacements made me feel a little less scared, because they made good imaginary friends. They looked like a band that would actually be fun to be in. Some bands just lend themselves to that fantasy, like Lynyrd Skynyrd or Earth, Wind & Fire—they looked like you could just drop in and they wouldn’t even notice you were hanging around for at least two albums. Jonathan Richman once said he for
med a band because he was lonely. The Replacements were imaginary friends who I could practice on while I was learning to have actual friends.
At night, everybody would gather on the couch to watch TV with the sound down, through a haze of bong smog, flipping channels while listening to Laurie Anderson. The goal was to find cosmic random synchronicities in the airwaves of the collective unconscious. One night, they flipped to a Superman cartoon during “O Superman.” Everybody freaked and ran out of the room. There was another hippie house on our block with some guys who called their band Acidemix. The only song they knew was “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” but they could play it for hours.
The neighborhood kids hung out in our yard, mainly because of Nick, who had a boa constrictor in his room. Once Nick let the kids come up to see Bo, we had the most popular house on the block. They lined up every evening for Bo’s dinner. Nick would bike home from Woolworth’s with a mouse in a cardboard box. The front of the box read, I’VE FOUND A HOME! The other side of the box read, SOMEBODY REALLY LOVES ME! The cover photo showed a boy and girl happily frolicking with their new hamster.
“Is he gonna eat that thing?”
“Damn.”
“Is he gonna kill it first?”
“Is the mouse dead?”
“I can see him.”
“He’s got to be dead now.”
After the snake had chowed down on the mouse, and the kids had finished screaming, Nick tossed the empty box out into the hallway, where they piled up and formed a little memorial pyramid. Every night, I came home from work and tiptoed to my room, stepping over the pile of I’VE FOUND A HOME! boxes.
I did a lot of things for the first time that summer: signed a lease, drank beer, drank coffee, gave myself a haircut, smoked pot, smoked Play-Doh (it took us all evening to realize it wasn’t really hash). I learned to wash dishes and make pasta. I drew the line at sex and hacky sack. One roommate, Matt, lost his virginity while I slept through the whole thing. Jorge Luis Borges died the night I smoked pot for the first time. There I was the morning after, groggily sitting in the backyard, lost in the circular ruins of Catholic guilt, and I read in the paper that one of my all-time literary idols had died overnight and I felt certain that God was punishing the whole world for my transgression.
Everybody in the house played music. We’d sit out on the porch all night, with Jeffrey and James on guitar, Nick on bongos and David on flute. Jeffrey and I wrote poetic ballads of torment and squalor (sample title: “My Baby’s Sleeping in a Burning House”). Jeffrey tried to teach me guitar, since I was desperate to join their jam sessions, but my fingers would not obey the merciless lashings of my muse. My burning desire to be the new Bob Dylan was severely hampered by the fact that I couldn’t even master the fucking chords to “Love Stinks.”
Occasionally they took off to follow the Dead’s summer tour, after Jerry got out of his coma. I went to the Dylan show at Madison Square Garden, a massive pilgrimage for me. His backing band was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who didn’t seem to know any of his songs, so every song sounded exactly like Billy Idol’s “White Wedding.” But what the hell—I got to see Dylan. We also decided to make a pilgrimage to every spot in New York that was mentioned in a Lou Reed song. We started out at Union Square but chickened out on the walk up to Lexington 1-2-5.
I also went to see the Replacements in Providence. It was the best night of my life up to that point, no question. It was an all-ages show at the Living Room. The opener was a local hard-core band called That’ll Learn Ya. Paul Westerberg and Bob Stinson were out on the floor, watching the band. That was the first time I’d ever seen the guys in the headlining band come out to stand in the crowd with the rest of us. They didn’t blend in, though. Paul Westerberg had these big, stripey, ’70s dork pants on. Bob Stinson was wearing a toga.
While Westerberg was sitting over at the bar, my roommate nudged me and we went over to say hi. I froze up and couldn’t utter a word, but he smiled and shook our hands, then said, “Well, gents, I’m gonna finish my Kool.” When he headed backstage, I eyeballed the butt in the ashtray. I only hesitated a second before I pounced. I carried that crushed Kool filter in my pocket all night like an amulet.
I had a wad of cotton I’d saved from aspirin bottles. Up front by the stage, I stuffed some cotton in my ears and passed it to the girl next to me, who took some and passed it on. She smiled. I smiled back. The Replacements came on and started with “Hold My Life.” It was pure noise, pure destruction. Everybody was pushing and thrashing and jumping—I was too. Paul Westerberg howled through his hair about small-town losers and big-town vices. Tommy Stinson sucked in his cheeks and preened for the ladies. Bob Stinson kept telling us, “Ya gotta boo!” The dude next to me kept throwing elbows and screaming for “Take Me Down to the Hospital.”
The Replacements jumped from one song to another—“Left of the Dial,” “I Will Dare,” “Bastards of Young.” They did the first verse of “Kiss Me on the Bus,” then got bored and trailed off. Paul said, “Okay, you sissies, this is an Aerosmith song,” and ripped into “My Fist Your Face.” They did the Green Acres theme, with Paul as Eddie Albert and Tommy as Eva Gabor. They started fucking around and switching instruments, with Paul playing drums for “Waitress in the Sky.” They lurched offstage, leaving Bob alone to do a solo version of “What Is and What Should Never Be.” When none of them were left standing, the Young Fresh Fellows came onstage, took their instruments and finished the show. “We’re the replacements for the Replacements,” the singer announced. They sucked. It was awesome.
I couldn’t even describe what a great night that was. I felt indestructible, or at least undestroyed, more alive than I’d ever been. I walked out of the show feeling like I could do anything, dare anything, just jump into anything. Us against the world. I was used to feeling “me against the world,” but “us against the world” was a lot more fun. My ears rang all the way home and I didn’t want them to stop. It made me want to go start something. It was the greatest punk rock show I had ever seen.
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.
THE SMITHS
“Ask”
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?”
“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?”
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut Page 14