Killing Us Softly
Who has the bigger ego - Yoko or me?:
I walk from Jim’s old apartment on 70th street and Columbus Ave in the mornings to the bus stop on 72nd and Central Park West where The Dakota is now a massive landmark. Dark-suited sentinels stand guard at the formal entrance gate; behind them iron lamps with real gas look as if they have burned immemorially. The shy and awestruck arrive, mostly in romantic pairs, to photograph the exact spot where John last breathed. They all ask the same tentative question of the guards, as if they are the first to think of taking a picture there. We are talking about a repeated proposition in the hundreds of thousands a year, and yet I have never seen the men who guard that memory be impatient with any of them.
I didn’t know that I would ever be this broke. I look up at the Dakota, now locked to me, as tour bus after tour bus arrives. I carry 18 quarters, 9 in each pocket of my coat. This is bus money from Jim, who has recently passed away to the same place as John — somewhere just below the ceiling of Jim’s apartment, where I look up and say my ‘Thank You’s for small miracles like the change jar that I pillage, his pots and pans, his shampoos and ointments, his easy chair and radio, his bed and down quilt, his rent-free apartment. Thank you, Jim.
Most of Jim’s things remain in the apartment, although they’ve been sorted through. The books are ordered into categories: Mexico, Psychedelics, Poets and Fiction, Self-healing, which is a hard shelf to see because he ultimately didn’t heal himself. The pictures and paintings that crowd the walls have post-it notes with friend’s names attached. His button-down shirts hang neatly, if tightly, on wire hangers in the old built-in wardrobe.
It’s not easy to be here with my free-floating anxiety. I have slipped in-between again and am a sub-tenant, nervous that others in the building see me come and go. The landlord has stopped accepting the rent-controlled rent and there is bound to be a scuffle over the last remaining bohemian hold out. There have been no renovations here — ever. The wind whistles through gaps in the bathroom walls and floor. The shower curtain rod around the ancient claw-footed tub is mended and held precariously with rusted wire. There really aren’t any smooth surfaces in the place. The only additions have been made by the brown-metal-window mafia, but these are ill-fitted into their orifices and only add a further sadness to the place. It is gruesome and homey at the same time.
For Jim there are are glowing, yellow, post-it squares on the only window emitting light. “You were the best,” “We loved you so,” are written in blue ink in children’s hands.
In the 1980’s I used to enter The Dakota through the service entrance. I was on the painting crew painting Yoko’s apartment. I rang a tiny bell on the side gate and walked down the sloping drive into the parking garage, which is a small world itself — an entire underground city block.
We were as close to possibility as anything in those days. We marveled at John and Yoko’s country — two identical apartments at the top of the world: one immaculate and white, where we removed our shoes and placed freshly laundered dropcloths down before we opened our cans of white paint; and the other the play apartment where music was made, and walls were splattered with color.
We didn’t understand in those days what a spiritual currency money was. We moved the gold records with our own hands. We hammered into walls to reveal the ancient, snaking electrical lines. We mixed Structolite and plaster in 5-gallon buckets on the kitchen floor. Our plaster knives flashed and hissed against the fresh compound on the walls.We suffered from the dust and labor and fatigue, but we had no ready rage yet.We sat for many lunches with Sean Lennon on his new deep purple wall-to-wall carpet, smelling of the special vegetable dyes, or on the frame of his new Balinese canopy bed. We talked about peace, and music, and the children that he taught, or the dark maroons, blues, and greens he had chosen for his new home.
What did we think? At 17 to have your own apartment in the Dakota, across the hall from Roberta Flack? To set up house with your exotic model girlfriend? What did we think? I think we thought we were as close to that as anything. We believed in miracles. We had been raised to believe were first class, and we were only traveling steerage. I didn’t know then that I would always be a usurper jumping the fence, not of class, but of the capital that made that kind of freedom possible. One rarely has any space at all to imagine when faced with the endless drama of lack.
I really wonder, as I wait for the uptown bus, who has the bigger ego here? Is it Yoko, master of her own domain, raised without a flicker of financial worry, who took it for granted that she would always keep company with the most extraordinary artistic, financial, and spiritual people; or is it me, the woman surprised and demoralized by my inability to carve out a piece of Heaven as precious as hers? Which woman has the bigger ego? Is it the one who has the entitlement to dream, or the one who is grief stricken that she hasn’t managed to live at the top of the Dakota? I am convinced that I could be magnanimous, and famous, and redeemed from that vantage too.
But I remember the startling grief of some of Yoko’s days, and her magnificent grace under inhuman pressure. I have never forgotten the story of the flowers. First you have to imagine just how big the parking caverns are below the Dakota, how deep the entrance, how high the ceilings. One could literally lose one’s car. Next you need to imagine Yoko’s view from the top, the vista out her windows, her careful white space, white curtains, white carpet, white couches, white piano.
In the middle of the mayhem surrounding John’s assassination, the press, the security, the lights and cameras…our boss, Michael, gets a call in the middle of the night, waking him out of sleep. “It’s Yoko…,” she says in that quiet, desperate way of hers.
The dilemma: The entire basement of the Dakota was filled with flowers, hundreds of thousands of bouquets of flowers in tribute to John’s life, with condolence cards attached. How could she answer them all? How could she sleep? How could she grieve in her penthouse while hundreds of thousands of bouquets of flowers withered slowly below her? It must have been a very cruel joke. But she had an idea. If Michael could call everyone he knew, and everyone she knew, maybe they could drive the flowers to every hospital and nursing home in the area before they died. And that is what they did. In van load after van load, tirelessly, ceaselessly, so that her grief might be lighter.
In 2012 I work in another penthouse on the upper west side. I don’t ask how much this light and air costs. I am painting my oldest friend’s apartment — we have known each other since we were 14! From her expansive patio one sees the tip of the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Spire, the edge of Central Park. At night one looks directly into the wall of windows and small patios in the low-income high rise across the street. Someone projects their flickering internet searches as high and wide as their living room wall. One keeps homing pigeons in wooden pens on his balcony, and they sit on the iron railing, coming and going freely. The tenant directly below has ripped and tied long strips of black plastic bags to his balcony bars, and they blow in the wind like the black scarecrows they were meant to resemble.
These visual riches! Even the inherent lack of privacy doesn’t discount the beauty of the multiple view, better than a book, a movie, a reality show — it is a building on the Upper West Side! And they have a perfect view down onto the huge private patio that only money can buy.
These days I prefer to think of my high school friend and Yoko, both as patrons of the arts. I wonder that it has taken me this long to realize how friendship works. I have been judgmental, a purist, one who believes in fairy tales. I find it hard to believe that with my pride and hubris I still have friends at all, especially ones who will save me in desperate times. I pillage a dead man’s change jar, and judge my friend’s inherited wealth. I tell her what colors to paint her penthouse, how to arrange her furniture, what storage she needs.
She has married, raised two children, owns many homes, businesses, and had hundreds of friends — and I really think she should listen to me, a woman experiencing penury, without a home, job, partner, children, or surviving dreams?! I ask my friend how I got here — didn’t I used to have things? After all, she has known me almost my whole life. The answer is not so simple.
When I was 8 it was always Paul who stared back at me from the talisman object, the record cover. It was never George or John or Ringo. Surely Paul and I would marry. I didn’t know that I would grow up and live as close as a neighbor to him in East Hampton, and glance at him in local cafes or the yoga studio. I didn’t know I would never know what it felt like to be as adored by as many trillions. I know now that my mother encouraged me with charming falsehoods that must have seemed real to her in the sixties: You can do anything, be anything you want.
I listen to Scorsese’s documentary on George Harrison while I paint my friend’s penthouse kitchen wall a perfect shade of tangerine. Watching Harrison’s slow burn at the end of his life was too much for me. Not much was mentioned about the fervor with which he pursued his periodic chemical and romantic addictions. It was only in the context of his insatiable search for truth that anything was said about these regular lapses from grace, when his addictions were visible in his gaunt cheeks, and his empty eyes, when he had no energy left for the search, and again relied on alternate means to get through his losses.
I went out one day at lunch and found a high piece of Manhattan shale to perch on. The striations ran in sparkling rivers across the rock. No-one in the whole expanse of Central Park appeared to be complaining in the unnatural spring air. But tears came easily to me in my old stomping grounds, where years ago I had sought huge chunks of ecstasy. This is where I drank in excess, studied, dreamed, cried, feared — and lost. In a moment it was so clear to me: I still hadn’t come to terms with my own death, and not coming to those deep terms shaped my life as much as the height of the Manhattan skyline was shaped by the depth of the shale underneath.
The Harrison documentary was still with me on my rock and I knew George was giving me the gift of a fresh narrative: It’s OK he told me. This search for relief from fear, and the journey through disillusionment with all the various forms of ecstasy, is such a human pursuit — maybe the only one.
I might not have been able to hear his message at any other time but this one, where I had bet and lost it all: “It’s OK. We all do this. It’s going to be alright.”
How simple. Over the years my rage had dissipated enough to hear the truths, even across money and entitlement lines: “It’s what you’re giving out, not what you’re taking in.”
George was a mediation devotee. No matter how he got there, or what he ingested he was preparing a fear-free path to take at the moment of his death! He longed to join that buzzing bliss, to be a part of making a sunrise. His wife said that when he passed away the room was suddenly illumined. Sculpting a life and death like that out of the imperfect pieces…wow.
I must remind myself that instead of standing under the Dakota and wailing: “Why me?!” I should say instead: “Why not me?” If a Beatle can suffer in his palace surrounded by gardens, music, money, love, and fame, then “Why not me?” If Yoko can and must suffer even at the top of the world, then: “Why not me?”
No matter the class, we all suffer, grieve, die, etc. Thank you for this poignant essay.
Also!!! Is the crawling Cinderella photo you!?!?