Life with Morrissey

          What can I say?
         I fell in love again.
         It’s a different kind of love though, the kind of love you only have once, and the love that lasts forever. It’s not the love where it consumes your privates and after two weeks of ‘love,’ you get bored. It’s nowhere near that. It’s not the kind of love where a couple marries, and as soon as they say ‘I do,’ they fall out of love and stay together out of necessity, routine and a fear of change. It will never be that, it can’t be. It’s the kind of love that’s a God given gift, the kind that burns with an immortal flame that can never be quenched.
I          ’ve fallen in love with someone, but it’s not for his good looks, amazing personality and dashing wit. My reasons go far beyond that. I don’t care about his grey hairs, his middle aged stockiness, I gladly overlook those characteristics. No, I’ve fallen in love with this man because of the voice that escapes his mouth.
         His name is Stephen Patrick Morrissey.
         His voice is for lonely people. He is for the people who do not know how to strike up conversation with a stranger on a bus. The people that say ‘excuse me’ when they bump into you at the grocery store without looking at you, an apologetic smile on their faces. The people who are nice enough, sometimes even delightful to be around, but most of the time they slip away before you notice they are even gone. The sad part is, there’s a lot of lonely people out there. It’s against those other lonely people that I will have to battle for his attentions.
         I didn’t mean for this to happen, honestly. It just happened, a bolt out of the blue, so to speak. It’s a freak occurrence of nature that should never happen, but it does. I never wanted to fall in love, but I heard his voice and I fell. It was as simple as that.
         My love affair with Morrissey is painfully short compared to the more fortunate that began to love him when they were still in the cradle or actual teenagers in the heyday of the Smiths. My older sister was part of the Riot Grrrrrl and Seattle grunge generation rather than the indescribable genre that Morrissey resides in. As a result I heard all about Mudhoney, Green River, and of course, motherfucking Nirvana; I heard about Juliana Hatfield, Patti Smith, and Ani DiFranco. But Moz had no chance with me in my childhood.
         It wasn’t until my freshman year of high school that I started hearing about the Smiths. It began with a t-shirt that a girl wore to school one day. She passed me in the hallway, and everything ceased to exist but that t-shirt. Black with a picture roughly screen printed across the front with THE SMITHS underneath in green lettering, that t-shirt took up my whole parameter of vision. I thought that t-shirt was beyond the adjective cool, it was perfect. I never asked that girl who the Smiths were, I just whispered the name to myself and tucked it away into a pocket of my memory, that’s how us lonely people operate.
         I remember the exact moment I first saw The Smiths. It was 8:45 P.M. on a late April day during my sophomore year. I had gone out after school with my best friend in the death machine she called her car, gotten stoned, ate fried chicken, came home and crashed in front of the TV and began my daily dose of music videos. It was a new half hour break of music videos hosted by a guy named Steven.
         I hated Steven. He was so smug, looking at the camera and introducing the music videos as they came. And they were all shitty music videos, nothing to be proud of introducing. Pop-Punk was the new craze, and come to think of it, it still hasn’t gone away. Avril Lavinge, Good Charlotte, watered down Blink-182, all those shitty bands were introduced by fucking Smug Steven in the same stretch. In all honesty, the only reason I didn’t surf past this channel was because I was too stoned to press a button.
         Then it happened.
         All hell broke loose, almost.
         I saw Morrissey, I saw his face, and I heard his voice.
         “Girlfriend in coma, I know, it’s serious.”
         What the fuck? Is this some kind of domestic violence song?
         “No I really don’t want to see her.”
         It wasn’t exactly a life changing moment. But I found out who The Smiths were, I saw their video, and I was enraptured. That should have been it, that should have been the moment everything made sense, The Smiths and Moz should have taken over my world right then and there. But when you’re fifteen, life moves so fast, like a carnival ride stuck on full speed, everything keeps spinning, long after the thrill has evaporated. But that night with The Smiths stayed with me, a superimposed memory over my spinning self. I would look into the mirror, and for a brief second, Moz would stare at me with those beautiful, wide eyes, beseeching me, begging a place in my body.
         I bought their CD, Strangeways, Here We Come, and I loved it. But at the same time I had just found all this other music that was not what my friends liked. I discovered all this music that had been hidden from me until now, good music, not the faux punk shit my friends blared on their distorted car stereos. I found the Pixies, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, I revisited the riot grrrl scene, I delved into the early ’90s. I had a whole musical battleground at my fingertips, and I was sorting the jewels from the land mines. It still wasn’t the right time for Morrissey to make his grand entrance.
         It would be almost another year before Morrissey could steal my heart. It was the first day of February, to be exact, and I was in a cold garage, freezing my tits off and shaking as I snapped pictures of a band as they strummed their way through the frosty night.
         This is what I did through high school: took pictures of teenaged garage bands that thought they would be the next big thing. It was my hobby, it gave me credentials, it staved off that lonely feeling. And best of all, this band had my good friend Matt in it, so I was spared the awkwardness of being a stranger.
         “I think we’re done.” the sound guy announced as he merged the tracks together on his computer. “Take a seat and I’ll play it back for you.”
         I waited for Matt as he struggled out from behind his massive drum set, his skinny body jumping and twisting over the cords as he fell in step with me and we walked towards the big couch that held the rest of the band.
         “Scoot over, motherfucker, ” Matt told the guitarist, a thick bodied Hispanic Jew.
         Enough space opened up for the both of us, and I sat down, wedged between Matt and another boy that I had never seen before.
         “Hey, Sarah, meet my friend Ricardo,” Matt nudged me and gestured towards the boy who sat on my right side.
         And for the first time I saw him. I saw Morrissey. Not the real Morrissey of course, but by some wicked twist of fate, instead of looking at Ricardo’s face, my eyes were drawn to his shirt. The bust of Morrissey was plastered across the front with bold lettering ‘THE SMITHS’ delicately screen printed underneath. I fell in love right that moment. Not with Ricardo, but with the way he was, I fell in love with Morrissey and The Smiths that very night.
         “Hello, nice to meet you.” he drawled in a heavy Californian-Spanish accent and offered his hand.
         He was beautiful. He was Hispanic, with deep, richly colored khaki skin that you can only get after years in the California sunshine. His lip was pierced in the center, and for a moment, all I could do was focus on those perfect pierced lips, and think of all the times that he had mouthed the words to Strangeways, Here We Come, which was still the only Smiths album that I owned. He wore loose jeans and skate shoes while the rest of the boys wore girl pants and Pumas as was the trend. He wore a grey thermal shirt underneath his crisp white Smiths t-shirt while the other boys wore tight hoodies. He also wore a dark red and linen colored beanie, with soft wisps of black hair peeking out from underneath, framing his bold face. He was the odd man out tonight, and I could feel my eyes burning through him.
         “You like the Smiths.” I said as I took his hand, it was the only thing I could say, the only thing I could push past my concrete lips and leaden tongue.
         He looked at me and smiled. He smiled with those thick, full lips with the metal slicing them in half. He smiled at me with the lips that sang Girlfriend In Coma. He didn’t say a word to me after that, but for the rest of the night he would look at me with those sly brown eyes and give me that metallic smile.
         I don’t really remember the rest of that night, except that Adam had showed up eventually and laid down his tracks. I also remember that it took all my strength to keep my eyes averted from Ricardo and his t-shirt. It took everything I had to keep my eyes and my camera off the Morrissey before me. I was punch drunk in love.
         The day after I met Ricardo, I went and liquidated my checking account, and with that money I bought every single Smiths and Morrissey album I could find. Ricardo had given me Morrissey, he was the key to that voice that I hadn’t heard in so long. This time, I was ready to let him in my life, to give my heart, body and soul. I was punch drunk in love.
         My friendship with Matt was kept alive through a mutual friend, so it was easy to see him. In all the excitement of newfound love with the Smiths, I hadn’t even bothered to ask him about Ricardo, who he was, where he had come from because all I could think of was Morrissey. But wherever Matt was, Ricardo was bound to be, and I began to find out more about my Morrissey incarnate. I was punch drunk in love
         Months went by, The Smiths tattooed themselves onto my psyche. All I heard was the music, the tempo, the masterful percussion and most of all, the lyrics– the gorgeous words that spilled out of such wonderful music killed me and resurrected me. It’s all that went through my head. Anything else was profane. Ricardo and I shared our first kiss in the backseat of a cold car after a night of video cameras and Spice World, the movie. All I could think of when I kissed him and tasted the metal in his lips was the fact that I was kissing the man who gave me Morrissey, who actually was Morrissey on another level. I was punch drunk in love.
         Spring slipped into summer, and Ricardo and I ended up sleeping with each other on a sweltering June night. We fucked, and all I could think of was the fact that I was fucking the very equivalent of Morrissey. That’s all I began to see him as: Morrissey. He gave me the key to all those albums, he made me hear Moz’s voice, and there is no human expression of gratitude that I can give to him for that. We didn’t see each other for a stretch of time after that night, for he had gone back to California for the rest of the summer. But it didn’t bother me. There was no need for me to miss him, I heard him every time I played The Queen is Dead.
         Sometimes I would have dreams of that June night. Movie stills almost. Dark flesh into my white skin. I would remember the green letters, MOZ tattooed on his stomach, my hand passing over his hips, and I would hear Morrissey crooning to me. I would see Morrissey’s face somewhere (a magazine, a clipping taped to the wall in my room), and I would think of my nails raking across his back. Ricardo and Morrissey were indistinguishable to me in the darkness of the night. When he and I sat together and bantered, or hung out with other friends, I saw him as he was, simply Ricardo. But when we were alone, listening to Moz or the Smiths, or when we kissed, all I could see him as was Stephen Patrick Morrissey.
         Sex with Morrissey is rough, frenetic and consuming. I expected nothing, I had no preconceived idea of what sex with him might be, so I took him as he was. It’s the best, most mind blowing sex I’ve ever had. The kind of sex you can only have with consuming, combustible love, idolatry and displaced passion, all of which I felt for Morrissey. Sex with Morrissey is a wild assault. You wouldn’t think that, listening to his sweet voice, his wry witticisms, but it is. Pleasure and Pain is combined, and you walk away from the bed shaking and broken. You don’t conquer Morrissey, he rules you, he makes you bleed, and makes your eyes roll back in their sockets. Yet his sweet songs (whichever one fits the situation) plays in your head, and it keeps your body moving.
         Last time I had sex with Morrissey, I couldn’t sit down without wincing for three days, and it hurt to take a piss for a longer stint. Something supernatural happens when Ricardo is taken over by Morrissey, and it’s frightening, awe-inspiring, and I wait for it. Sex like that the most animalistic side of you, screaming insanity as Morrissey’s got you by your neck, pumping his lyrics into you as hard as he can. It’s fast and brutal and your vagina is black and blue for days. But you love it. You’d die for it. Who wouldn’t? After all, you’re getting fucked by the fucking Moz.
         Us lonely people read all the interviews we can get; we spend extraordinary amounts of time online downloading any and all of his photographs; we know where he lives; we know every movement he makes; we even know the names of his goddamn dogs. But that isn’t the real Morrissey. The real Morrissey can’t be put into words, you can only listen to him. You can only love him as his spirit takes over a human body and fucks you senseless, musically and physically.
         And I love him.
         I love Stephen Patrick Morrissey despite the scratches, bruises and bite marks he has given me. Why? Because he is my sickness and my cure. His songs soothe and heal the aches he gives me. He reaches you through a key (a secret agent if you wish), and mine came through a doe eyed Latino stranger. But unlike all of your other mortal lovers, as long as you hold a silver disc, Morrissey is with you. He will never, ever leave you as long as you hold his very voice in your hands. He accepts you for who you are, and if you love him, he will forever love you, even in the darkness of the night as you lay beside him, bruised, scratched and bleeding.