I didn't write anything here the other day to mark 'that anniversary'. I was off visiting a friend, and I assumed there was enough media over... um, kill, anyway.
I figured why add to all that, when so many people can say it better.
But how can I not?
What was the worst day of your life? Or the biggest tragedy you can remember?
Being a baby boomer the central event of my live, the big before and after, will always be the JFK weekend.
Y'know that "you always remember where you were when you heard" thing? I was at school and they told us to go home. I have a better story, though: my mom's. Checkout at the supermarket. The cashier told her "the President's been shot". Wanting to know how serious the wound was, my mother asked "Where?" and the clerk replied "Dallas".
Thee were only three television networks in those days, and this was the story on all three non-stop all weekend long, with the emotional climax being the opportunity to see the ultimate vigilante revenge fantasy acted out in real time: the man accused of killing the President being gunned down on live TV on a Sunday afternoon. I was ten.
Of course we all have our personal stories. Y'know that expression "You look like you just lost your best friend"? My best pal in 1980 was Scott MacEachron, the writer of the first issue of Nice Day Comix. Gas leak. I went to his funeral and then went to work. Not good.
No matter how the event's been exploited for political reasons, you can't diminish the original impact of 9/11. I slept in late that day and missed the live coverage of the mayhem. Instead I turned the TV on around 7:00 PM. The distraught anchorperson was seated in from of a graphic reading "America Under Attack" and told and retold the tales of planes crashing into both of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and crashing en route to the White House. It was on every major channel I turned to. They were making it sound like World War Three had begun and they were just waiting for the next wave of attacks to occur.
Wake up to that.
But I'm digressing. Postponing that horrible moment we know is coming whenever we hear someone talk about John Lennon.
I was working the morning shift at Heringtons Self Serve Gas. Going in early to load the vending machines and empty the trash cans and get the lights on at 6:00 AM. And I'm not a morning person. It was dark. I don't remember if I was driving up Alpine or getting off the freeway. I don't remember what songs they'd been playing on the radio, but it was either the Beatles or John Lennon, maybe both, and several in a row.
I do know I was a block from work - or less, when the song ended and a somber DJ informed me that
"We've been listening to the music of John Lennon, who was shot and killed last night in New York City in front of the Dakota apartment building where he lived."
I may not have that exactly verbatim past the first fourteen words, but those are the ones seared into my memory.
It was another rough shift. I doodled cartoons on the back of cigarette carton cardboard as a coping mechanism. I listened to the radio.
"I wish I was a baby, I wish I was dead", "Feel so lonely, wanna die", "Happiness is a warm gun", "Baby's in black", "The way things are going, they're gonna crucify me."
Having gone through a failed affair the previous year, having lost my best friend, this was not the first time I ever cried uncontrollably while at work. Just the worst.
I turned to my drug of choice after getting off work. I visited my dealer on the way home and scored and copped a good buzz. He really didn't want to talk about the topic du jour. He wasn't really a Beatles fan, he said.
And he made a valid point. "Somewhere In New York City" and "Walls and Bridges' and "Rock'n'Roll" had not been Lennon at the top of his game, and then he went into five years of heroin and marriage based reclusive retirement and seclusion. "when was the last time anyone even played a John Lennon record, and now everyone's acting like they were his biggest fan." Harsh, but valid.
But it wasn't just the death of a pop star on the comeback trail. It wasn't even the end of the Beatles dream; that had occured a decade earlier.
But for us... the baby boomers, the hippy generation, the flower children, the peace and love crowd, the youth revolution, the counter culture, this was the dividing point by which everything would be sorted into befoe and after. Our JFK.
I'd guess that for anyone too young to remember the end of world War Two, all of history can be divided into four parts: before and after November 22nd, 1963, before and after December 8th, 1980, before and after 9/11.
Those are the big three. Everything else that happened - The Moon Landing, Woodstock, "Roots", The Berlin Wall coming down, the final Seinfeld, Bush's War, Little Bush's War - that's just stuff that happened.
JFK, 9/11, John Lennon's murder. That's stuff that happened to other people, but it's also stuff that happened to us. (fist over heart gesture) Here. Inside.
That's why I couldn't not write something.
= Napoleon Park =
