By Tim Lieder
We were sitting on the sidewalk outside Rocky’s. Cars
crawled down the street. Bikes chained themselves to trees. College students
were going to the bars across the street, the fast food places, the bookstores.
Aleister was eating a complimentary employee pizza – veggie of course.
He used to Dumpster dive behind Rocky’s back in Roseville, but that
was cool. That was youth, poverty and all that punk shit. Everyone had
to Dumpster dive behind Rocky’s to be punk in Roseville.
The complimentary slice was to avoid the package of tofu rotting in his fridge. Sirens went off blocks away. Down the corner, a dirty dreadlocked white kid was playing guitar. Across the street, a woman in a leather jacket was playing the same three notes on a recorder. You could smell the rain that would come in a few hours. Aleister was talking about some story that he was trying to write about tribal cyberpunks – aren’t they all tribal? He told me about Anne Rice’s bad prose. It’s good for 100 pages, and then it sucks.
Then Aleister was singing Smiths songs. I hated the Smiths – glib sorrow packaged to girls that outgrew bubblegum bands. I knew too many women that bought into Morrissey’s celibate poet of angst act. Aleister was less animated that night. He wasn’t meowing, but he was loving it.
You go to the party all alone and you come home all alone – and you cry and you want to die. I was already laughing. It went beyond the Cure, well beyond Thomas Wolfe’s ‘oh sorrow, oh pain’ every other sentence. That woman wasn’t going to let Young Werther wash her hands in his tears. This was Sylvia Plath imitation poetry of the worst order. Yes, I know Sylvia Plath’s poetry could punch Patti Smith around, bite pieces of Burroughs and go outside for a smoke before blowing off Rimbaud’s head. I hadn’t read it yet – only the imitators. She’s still much funnier if you replace every fifth word with “squid.”
In between stanzas, Aleister lectured me on the greatness of the song. But the guitar part is soooo coooool. I am only Huuuu—man and I need to be lu-u-u-uved just like anybody else – don’t ask me to remember. Yishka – his fiance – could write lyrics to crush them. But the guitar part. Aleister wouldn’t shut up about the fucking guitar. And he kept repeating the sad lines and giggling.
It made me laugh. Sorry, I know everyone loves this song. Hell, I made the mistake of mocking Morrissey openly around the wrong people, and that was the end of those friendships. I was a sad, lonely jerk, and I knew it was pathetic. I had a crush on some girl that didn’t care about me or didn’t like me that way or at least I assumed. I didn’t ask her out because I was prone to staring at walls whenever she was around. I don’t know which one it was that month. I think it was the one I said three words to at a party once.
Aleister was on his third or fourth engagement. He was 22. The engagements never worked. He worshipped his girlfriends when he wasn’t welded to his keyboard. One of his potential wives married his best friend Jarrod a month after their breakup. The couple would have done it sooner, but it was snowing that week. He went to the wedding party, dropped mushrooms and watched videos. I never would have talked to either one again.
We sat on the sidewalk as the traffic passed and bums asked for the change. Morrissey going to his party all alone and coming home all alone and crying and wanting to die. Morrissey could be only human needing to be loved, but we were on the sidewalk singing songs to the moon, lonely as hell, laughing.