Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want

Trigger warning: This essay talks about depression and suicide.

PHOTO NICK WHEELEHON PHOTOGRAPHY

1.

I lay across the top bunk in my boyfriend’s dorm room, with my head over the edge to stare at the top of his strawberry blond head. He sits at his desk, thumbing at his bass. Everything he does is cool, because he doesn’t do so many things. He isn’t an overachiever like me, on the leadership board of two high school honor societies; he doesn’t even have a major. He doesn’t fight, and instead says “whatever, man.” He doesn’t have anything on his desk but his Macbook, a radio speaker, and above, a Meat Is Murder poster. 

The first time he invited me over, he had asked me if I knew The Smiths. I bet he expected me to say no, but I said yes, and it was true, though I worried he’d quiz me on their entire discography. I’m a vegetarian, like Morrissey, and I think that counts for something. I like “How Soon Is Now?” a lot.

The Smiths will forever be a favorite of kids at liberal arts colleges who stand alone at parties, who “will go home, cry and want to die” like me and many people I knew. In the 1980s, they gave a voice to Manchester youth, and then youth around the world who were feeling lonely, dissatisfied, and fed up with their home, the government, loneliness, love, and more. When I’m 18, these songs all boiled down to intense longing, and The Smiths had a profound grasp on it, even if the lyrics simply went: So please please please / let me, let me, let me / let me get what I want / this time.

I think I will spend forever looking at my boyfriend’s hair, hearing him shuffle and sigh. I want to study acting, but I am too scared to fail. I want to fight him when he calls me “man” but I don’t. I don’t stand up for anything.

I don’t believe I have a future. I used to daydream about becoming an actress. I used to sneak out from the summer home we’d visit in North Carolina every year, and stare at the ocean before the sun came up. (I used to think one day I’d be plucked from obscurity to become a Disney Channel star, and then, Joe Jonas’s girlfriend. I would fantasize about disappearing from the Teen Choice Awards to make out with him in a closet. I would scour the internet on the family desktop to find the dress I’d wear in this situation, and listen to “Lovebug” and really concentrate on his breath; I thought I was really manifesting when I did this.) Now I bob my head to the rhythm of my boyfriend’s thrums.

We lay across his bed when “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” blares from the speaker. He laughs uncomfortably at and if a ten ton truck kills the both of us / to die by your side / would be a heavenly way to die. I don’t find this discomfort alarming from someone who doesn’t say “I love you”; I also don’t think I’ve ever heard anything more true in my young life. When he spoons me, I hold my breath to sync the movement of our chests. 

2.

When I pull myself together to go to college, I buy a Meat Is Murder poster from the start-of-semester poster sale. I am giving into decorating, though I had told my mom it was pointless when she had dropped me off that August. I am heartbroken and hopeless. My boyfriend broke up with me; now I listen to “Unhappy Birthday” to feel angry, instead of the ceaseless stretch of sadness. And if you should die, I may be slightly sad but I won’t cry /  From the one you left behind, behind, behind. 

The Smiths poster in my beloved’s dorm room, taken on a disposable film camera.

The Smiths poster isn’t just a shrine to my love, but also a token for whoever I’d become when I’m here. My mother gasps when I come home from the mall with a pixie cut; I meet people on campus and they call me Winona. (I see no higher compliment—Heathers is my favorite movie.)

I enroll in an acting class on campus. On the first day I hold back tears when the teacher gives us our first assignment; I don’t know why I’m bothering with this anyway. I will get my English degree and die before I’m twenty-five. Maybe I will get some mystery illness, or I will actually kill myself.

When I perform the assignment for the class, I get so caught up in it that hot tears stream down my face. They aren’t embarrassed, fearful tears like the ones that threatened to spill over on day one; these tears come when for a moment I disappear completely into the existence that I had created in the exercise. My classmates are silent for a moment, then they gush; my teacher smiles at me; a girl I haven’t spoken to before, Emily, tells me she loves me. 

People tell me I have an 80s sensibility. It’s more than just the Winona resemblance; I don’t care much for current trends; I hate my social media accounts. I think logistically how I would survive if I rejected cell phones completely. It seems so romantic to talk on the phone, coiling and uncoiling the cord around my fingertips, talking to a lover, to make plans and keep them. 

My little crush on a girl from my theatre history class turns into something more when she throws a plastic lay over my shoulders at the BBQ party. I feel so untalented and too boyish when I miss out on the lead role in the semester’s mainstage production, even when Emily and my classmates tell me I was jipped. 20-year-olds run full steam at a row of garbage bags, a makeshift slip n’ slide. This pretty classmate says my androgyny is hot. We bump each other, swaying all the way back to my apartment. She reminds me of 500 Days of Summer, so I play the Smiths; I could be her cool indie boyfriend. The room spins from my bed, so she lays on the rug. She falls asleep quickly. “There Is A Light” comes on and I cry drunk tears. I can’t help myself. 

3.

After graduating, she and I are caught in the frenzy of trying to make it in New York. We feel jaded about the times we didn’t get a chance in the plays at school. It still feels important, so we talk about it too much. 

We act in shitty off-off Broadway that no one sees. I sit with my legs spread on the steps of the Pennsy, waiting for her to get off the LIRR. I go by a new name and wear glasses that remind me of James Dean. I smoke American Spirits and restart “A Rush and a Push” over and over—I don’t even wait for the song to finish. I feel like my life is starting new. We traipse around the Lower East Side holding hands and drink $4 margaritas. 

At the Cubbyhole NYC for the first time.

I snag an audition for a TV series that would change my life. When casting makes conversation after the scene, instead of just dismissing me with a “thank you,” I rush home to get my passport renewed. My girlfriend stresses that I would have to be in Vancouver into the next year. She also doesn’t hide her jealousy successfully. I console her; I also know I would leave everything behind and never look back. 

I don’t get the part. I stay and cry. I wonder if I’ll be a failure forever; I wonder if my favorite color yellow looks wan on me; I wonder if I’ve gained weight and it looks bad. I turn my face side to side, examining the stark line of my jaw, the expanse under my cheekbones to see if this is in fact true. 

My girlfriend and I visit our college town. We see a show, eat tofu wings, and have a respectable two drinks. What is this town to us if we don’t sway in the streets? She corrects people who call me by the wrong name; they do it again a moment later. Maybe I don’t ever want to come back here. When I’m home I listen to The Queen Is Dead in my room with the lights shut off. Past the pub who saps your body / And the church who'll snatch your money / The Queen is dead, boys / And it's so lonely on a limb. I stare at the mirror, turning my sad face from side to side like a cuckoo clock. 

4. 

I spend a lot of time daydreaming in make-up chairs, thinking about love and wondering when I will do more than short films and non-union work. I spend even more time sitting at the pub where a friend bartends. I consider her my best friend, but she doesn’t see me that way. Yearning for her love feels almost romantic. It is the closest thing I have to romance, now that I’m single. When the bar is busy, I sip on whatever drink she feels like making, and I read. I sleep next to her in her bed in Queens, and I constantly go to my day job in the same clothes I wore the day before. Sometimes I wear her sweaters and haphazardly ripped t-shirts; one time I wore her undies.

She starts a career in nightlife. We’re up all night at the gay bar near her apartment. I spend the whole time wanting to go back to her place. The valuable time I spend with her is also spent with twinks who pay no attention to me—I don’t even know that they like her. I feel like too much of a woman to sit comfortably here, and too much of a man to sit at the bar and look pretty, and not enough of anyone to get her attention.

Overcome or just tired, on the lounge floor in my office.

This guy I used to hook up with occasionally texts me—we set a date to meet up. On Halloween our first year at school, our costumes accidentally matched—I was Edie Sedgwick and he was Lou Reed. We had the same Meat Is Murder poster. He would talk ad nauseam about his music and wanted to discuss everything very deeply.

We meet at the bar where my friend works. She plys me with drinks before he arrives late due to construction on the Q. He leads me by the arm to an Indian restaurant, and back to his apartment in fuck-if-I-know, Brooklyn. He doesn’t have his Smiths poster anymore. His music equipment is buried under laundry. He’s rude the next morning. 

I throw up in a bag on the subway. I wonder if I should hang out with my not-BFF anymore. I remember this guy telling me my totally subjective opinion about The Smiths was wrong. Somehow, I make it all the way home without my phone—I had lost it.

5. 

In November of this past year, Patrick and I meet Emily for dinner at an outdoor restaurant in my old college town. My relationship with Patrick is fresh, and it's work but in a way that is worth it. We walk hand-in-hand to the restaurant. 

The three of us buy three bottles of wine at the table and drink them all. Then we sway in the streets. We get shitty pizza like college kids after parties. I don’t feel jaded anymore. Emily asks about the films I’m working on. She shakes her head when she cannot keep track of them. 

All smiles, taken with a Polaroid camera.

We had raised our glasses to the upcoming premiere of my feature film debut. I only faintly remember hopelessness, but I know I never pictured such a moment. 

I don’t regale them with the story of Shoplifters of the World—the story of teen fans of the Smiths in 1987—how frustrated and androgynous me took a leap by auditioning for a role meant for a man, that the song that plays in my scene is one of the many songs I used to cry to, “The Queen is Dead.” How it all feels so serendipitous. 

We go back to Patrick’s apartment and he puts The Smiths’ self-titled on the turntable. When we first started dating, we used to talk on the phone all night. He’d say my chosen name to me quietly in the dark; I’d coil the cord of my headphones around my finger. He tells me I am both handsome and beautiful.

Emily slurs that I’ll be a star someday. I smile to entertain her thought. When I catch up with her on the phone, we say “I love you” and mean it. I don’t say “I love you” to my partner yet, but I know I will at some point in the future.

STORY & PHOTOS ELLIOT FRANCES FLYNN

Up-and-coming actress Elliot Frances Flynn pens a personal essay about how the 1980s band The Smiths were instrumental to her finding love and happiness. The Smiths was the “soundtrack of her life” as she grappled with depression, realized her dream of becoming an actress, and got comfortable in her own skin. Coming full circle, Elliot will make her feature film debut in the Smiths infused comedy-drama ‘Shoplifters of the World,’ available to watch in theatres and on-demand on March 26th.