It had been a long Monday in early December of 1980, my freshman year at Manhattanville College in New York. After a full day of classes and a nighttime slot as disc jockey for the campus AM radio station, I hit the showers and returned to my dorm room intent on watching the end of the Dolphins/Patriots game on Monday Night Football. As I dried off my hair, I was stunned to hear announcer Howard Cosell digress from the on-field activity:
“This is just a football game. An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City. John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York…shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital…dead on arrival.”
Within seconds, I began to hear the sounds of female co-eds up and down our wing of Spellman Hall crying out in horror, an unnerving echo of grief that shivered my bare skin. What the fuck? As my eyes filled with tears, I took some weak-kneed steps towards my bed. Sitting down, I swallowed the news and made it my own: John was gone. The dream was over. As a child born in 1962, I reached the age of two and they invaded. It was all over after that. My oldest brother, Mickey, was in a rock band as I grew up a small boy idolizing how cool he was. The Beatles, and John, were his heroes – and, so, they became mine. He once met George Harrison. I would listen to the old Capitol LP’s him and my oldest sister, Nancy, owned; sometimes it would come down to crying, screaming, and kicking up a storm to get to borrow them for an hour or two. At night, I would fall to sleep with a small transistor radio under my pillow, locked on to the hot AM stations of New York City, my heart leaping back awake whenever a Beatles song would burst through the speaker.
In April of 1970, my mother bought me my first record, a copy of Paul McCartney’s first solo album, McCartney. A few weeks earlier I had been visiting our family dentist, who liked to listen to the radio as he did work. He was talking to his assistant, and I looked up to see his eyes above the line of his dental mask – they were getting wet and glistening. He stopped drilling for a few moments, and I was afraid, asking him what was wrong. There was Beatles music coming from the office radio, and he said, “They’re breaking up.” He shook his head. “They just announced The Beatles are breaking up.” I had never seen my father cry, and Dr. Brittan was the first man I’d ever witnessed, up close, come to tears. Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away…
So, for the next decade, I stood on the sidelines and held my breath: when would they come together? As I sat on the edge of my bed at Manhattanville College on December 8, 1980, I let the breath go and wept. The sobs of grief were soon interrupted by a knocking on my door. Several young women stood out in the hall, wanting to come in and listen to my Beatles albums. For the night my room was open, the music played, and we cried and sang and lost the dream together.
I still miss you, mate.
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