Happiness is a Warm Gun
“I heard your friend died,” Mavis, a friend of Mom’s says while I mull over a soggy bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes on the early morning of December 9th, 1980.
“Yeah.”
“It’s so sad.”
“Yeah.”
John was definitely a friend. Maybe even a brother. Or the cool rocker uncle I wished I had. Losing him is devastating.
On the bus ride into the city the neighborhood kids don’t feel the loss as much as I. They know I am a fan and respect my silence. But halfway through the hour-long commute a particularly cheeky kid says, “I don’t know what the big deal is. All he did was sit and play piano.” Tyrone’s disparaging remark gets a few laughs. I mark him as a kid that I may laugh again with on the bus ride to and from school but know deep in my heart he will never be a friend.
The kids at Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design are all somber. There is chatter in the halls between classes, everyone seems to have a remembrance or favorite song. The eyes of the students and young teachers read disbelief, anger and profound sadness.
At lunch some kids break into impromptu sing-alongs of John’s impressive catalog- “Give Peace A Chance,” “Imagine,” “All You Need Is Love”. In the big cafeteria, clusters of sad adolescents intone the lyrics and melodies of various songs that I too know by heart.
All during lunch I look for Karen. I hadn’t seen her in the morning drawing class that we shared, and she wasn’t at her usual cafeteria table. Karen is a lovely Latina with big soulful eyes. She’s also smart as a whip. The cream on top of this attraction was discovering via T-shirts, badges, and stickers on her loose-leaf binders that she loved John too. I’d hoped to see Karen today, to look into her deep brown eyes and share a moment, even if it is a sad one. Knowing how dedicated a fan she is I figured she was at the Dakota vigil, same as many other classmates were planning to attend when the school day ended. It is a bitterly cold day in New York City, icy winds cutting through my flimsy winter coat and into my bones. It’s getting dark and I just want to go home. There’s more forced levity from Tyrone and my chums in the back of the bus but I remain silent. Nothing seems funny anymore.
Back home, after dinner, Mom and I watch the evening news. She starts to cry while watching the vigil in front of John’s Manhattan apartment building. Slumping down next to me she cries while repeating, “It’s a damn shame. A damn shame.”
Two weeks later it’s Christmas and I receive several LPs as a gift from Mom. This year, almost like a sad joke she gives me John and Yoko’s “Double Fantasy.” It’s bad enough I can’t escape his bitterly ironic pop hit “(Just Like) Starting Over” on the radio, now I’ve got that and other audio epitaphs that Mom will want to hear seeping from my bedroom speakers. I don’t thank her for the LPs, just wince as if a deep wound were just re-opened, and file the record into my collection, never removing the shrink wrap.
As cliché as it may sound a part of me died when John Lennon was killed. After John’s death I stopped playing my guitar, not picking up the instrument for another fifteen years. Like millions of other youngsters my age I yearned for three like-minded mates to start a band as cool and talented and adored as The Beatles. Now, with John gone that dream is dead with him.
The trauma of John’s death in 1980 was worse than losing my grandparents a few years later, maybe because they were already old, and had at some time or another admonished or spanked me. John, like a perfect brother or uncle, never hurt me. He only brought lightness and love, lullabies and rallying cries that I could access and replay any time I needed. In my grief over John, I sleepwalked through school and the only job that I could handle as a zombie- record store salesman. I slept through life, and when I started to wake up I began smoking weed to send me back to sleep. This is how I lived through the 1980s.