"What struck me, what took me back irresistibly, was realizing how much I loved his voice and how inextricably bound up it was with my own growing up. It was a voice I must have heard almost every day for years, on television, radio or record. It was more exceptional then than it is now, not being the voice of the BBC or of southern England, or of a politician; it was neither emollient nor instructing, it was direct and very hip. It pleased without trying to. [...] It is aggressive and combative but the violence in it is attractive since it seems to emerge out of a passionate involvement with the world."
--Hanif Kureishi, "Eight Arms to Hold You"
Five years ago I was at Strawberry Fields, at the Dakota on the twentieth anniversary of John Lennon's murder. (Isn't it strange how you never hear it referred to as an assassination anymore? I haven't heard it once today. Perhaps we've finally come to accept the essential senselessness of the act.) I was there to honor a vow made ten years earlier to the day, in my senior year of high school. My friend Greg and I had just staged one of those minor symbolic victories so important to teenagers, getting Lennon's music played at a high school event the night after the anniversary of that other day that shall live in infamy had prompted a militaristic tribute to our troops. This was in the days of Desert Shield as our country was gearing up for its first (and, unknown to us at the time, far less painful) war in Iraq and then even moreso than now every expression of sympathy for the people fighting the war was twisted into an endorsement of the people who were waging it. This message was not as popular among a bunch of teenage boys who were looking down the barrel of their eighteenth birthdays in the coming year. It seemed very important to imagine there's no countries. And we made it happen, an event that had no impact on international diplomacy but quite a profound one on our spirits, and Greg and I vowed that whatever we were doing, whoever we were, in ten years we were going to meet in New York City.
So I went up for the day, stayed around for maybe five or six hours. Let down when I first climbed up out of the subway, disappointed to see my destination of ten years was right there in front of me and attended by so few, mostly camera-clicking tourists (whom I promptly joined). Then I discovered the big sing-along across the street at Strawberry Fields, the afternoon celebration that preceded the night's memorial. The voices of hundreds of fans matching the records effect for effect, a perfect fit for the analogue recording technology of thirty-three years earlier. He'd finally got his chorus of backwards-singing monks. The music dropped off as night fell--maybe a tamer crowd, maybe more real musicians, definitely more drunken assholes. Three middle-aged ladies, one in furs, all holding candles. A lot of circular-framed glasses. I had burned through that phase several years earlier myself. A John Lennon impersonator who looked really close but couldn't quite hit the high notes, and then an older, shorter guy who looked more like I thought Lennon would twenty years later--an older, tamed dad.
(Writing this from my notes five years later, it occurs to me that what I saw in that better Lennon impersonation may have been my own dad, who was born three years after Lennon. To the day.)
Wander off to the Dakota. A quieter, more contemplative place, the spot of the murder marked with a shrine of flowers, photographs, candles, homemade posters, testimonies, JOHN I MISS YOU SO--that one almost gets to me. (Still.) A wooden diptych, perhaps made from shallow drawers mounted on door hinges, with pictures of John pasted over pastel background paper. A blanket with an embroidered dove. Attendants working on no authority save custom and decorum handing candles out to strangers and lighting them. Up against the Dakota itself some baroque wrought-iron sculpture, some sea-god perhaps, overgrown and made into a cornucopia of flowers and apples. Many Asian visitors, even for NYC, snapping pictures. He means something different to them, perhaps the only people who collectively do not hold the Oriental dragon lady against the magic prince. The music from Strawberry Fields drifts across the avenue. A hobo blasting Kid Rock out of the boom-box in his cart turns away in disgust as some obnoxious Jersey kid heckles the crowd for the benefit of his friends. I scanned the crowds for Greg, clinging to my most recent (years-old) information, a story that he'd dyed his hair red. No sign of him, scarlet or otherwise. Just the baby boomers, bohemians, and, this gave me hope, a bunch of teenagers, including one who looked just like a clan of sisters from Eleanor Roosevelt High School circa ten years earlier. This was as close as I would come to my anticipated reunion. I realized I hadn't brought anything of myself to leave so I walked down the block to get some candles at a market. Picked up a bunch of extras with the idea that I would become one of those self-appointed acolytes welcoming other people to the moment, but I bought the wrong size and when I got back I couldn't give the damned things away. Maybe there was something too desperate in my bids to hand them out, something that made these fellow pilgrims think I was selling them or using them to hit on sad and beautiful women. In retrospect offering them to the most distraught was a callous mistake. The only one I gave out was to a very angry little guy who sounded even more out of place than I felt.
I knew I should have tracked Greg down, called him up--it would have been quite easy at the time--but I'd been afraid that doing so would have contaminated the vow, an admission that it needed the help. Yet any disappointment at this act of self-sabotage is tempered, now, five years later, by the belated realization that my vow wasn't really about reliving high school triumphs or honoring adolescent pledges, which carry all the heft of yearbook promises. I was standing on West 72nd Street on a cold December night after driving for four hours and taking the PATH train and the subway for a fifth and planning in just a few minutes to go do the whole thing again in reverse because there was a man, direct and exceptional and combative and very hip and passionately involved with the world, whose voice I had grown up with and loved.
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