Killing Us Softly

New York City, 2012

In the mornings I walk from Jim’s old apartment on 70th street and Columbus to the bus stop on 72nd and Central Park West where The Dakota is now a historical landmark and tour bus destination. Dark-suited sentinels stand guard at the formal entrance gate. Huge iron gas lamps burn behind them as if immemorially. The shy and awestruck arrive, mostly in romantic pairs, to photograph the exact spot where John Lennon took his last breath. They approach the guards tentatively, all ask the same question, as if they are the first to think of taking a picture there. This must be a proposition repeated in the tens of thousands every year, and yet I have never seen the men who guard John’s memory be impatient with any of them.

I didn’t know that I would ever be this broke. I am just back from Berlin, where I have tried to eradicate another broken heart. I have been invited by my best friend from childhood. I am to paint her new apartment and stay in her friend Jim’s apartment. 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 I suspect. It’s somewhere just below the ceiling of Jim’s apartment, where I look up and say my ‘Thank Yous’ for the small miracles like the change jar that I pillage for morning bus fare, 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.”
From the bus stop across the street I look up at the penthouse of The Dakota, and remember that it is now locked to me. Thirty years ago it was where I arrived for work in the mornings. In the early 1980’s I used to enter the building through the service entrance in my paint splattered clothes, no questions asked. I was on the painting crew in 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 that was immaculate and white, where we removed our shoes and placed freshly laundered drop cloths 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 were a young crew of men and women in our twenties who were singers and artists and poets and musicians. Michael’s crew. I don’t think we understood in those days what a spiritual currency money was, and how it could open up the horizon. We worked for food and rent and time off to pursue art. I’m not sure what we thought about the seventeen year old Sean Lennon who was about to have his own apartment in the Dakota to set up house with his exotic model girlfriend. We sat for many lunches with Sean on his deep purple, wall-to-wall carpet, still smelling of the special vegetable dyes, or on the frame of his antique Balinese canopy bed. We talked about peace, and music, and the schoolchildren that Sean was teaching, or the dark maroons, blues, and greens he had chosen for his new home. 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.

We moved the gold records off the music room walls 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. I didn’t know then that I would always be a usurper jumping the fence, not of class, but of the capital that made this kind of freedom possible. One rarely has any space at all to imagine when faced with the endless drama of just enough.

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? I am convinced that I could be magnanimous, and famous, and redeemed from that vantage too.

Michael told us once about the startling grief of Yoko’s days after John had been shot, and her magnificent grace under 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, got a call in the middle of the night, waking him out of sleep. “It’s Yoko…” she said in that small, desperate way of hers. The dilemma was that 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. She couldn’t sleep. How could she answer them all? How could she grieve while a city block of flowers withered slowly below her? It must have been a very cruel joke. But she had an idea that Michael could call everyone he knew with a van, and everyone she knew with a van, and 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, all night and the next day, so that her grief might be lighter.

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I am in New York City working in another penthouse on the upper west side thirty years later. I am painting my oldest friend’s new apartment. We have known each other since we were fourteen. I don’t ask how much my friend’s precious light and air costs. 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 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 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!

I listen to Scorsese’s documentary on George Harrison while I paint my friend’s penthouse kitchen wall the perfect shade of tangerine. It is still one of my favorite pursuits, to paint a straight line down a wall with my 3” angled Purdy brush. No taping required. My hand and eye so attuned after all these years. I stop for breaks to watch the images of George on the large wall-sized TV. Harrison’s slow burn at the end of his life was almost too much for me. Scorsese rarely mentioned the fervor with which George 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. 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 the buzzing bliss, to be a part of making a sunrise. Sculpting a life and death like that out of the imperfect pieces - wow. His wife said that when he passed away the room was suddenly illumined.

At night I ride the bus down to 70th and Columbus to Jim’s apartment where I am staying. Most of his things are still where he left them. The books have been sorted into categories: Mexico, Psychedelics, Poets and Fiction, Self-healing, which is a hard shelf to see because he ultimately didn’t heal himself from his cancer. For Jim there are are glowing, yellow, post-it squares on the only window emitting light. “You were the best,” and “We loved you so,” are written in blue ink in children’s hands. 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 in a dead man’s apartment with my free-floating anxiety. I have slipped in-between again. I am a sub-tenant, nervous that others in the building should see me coming and going. The landlord has stopped accepting the rent-controlled rent and there is bound to be a scuffle over one of the last remaining bohemian hold outs. It is gruesome and homey at the same time. 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.

These days I prefer to think of my high school friend and Yoko, both as patrons of the arts. 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 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 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 has 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. I don’t know the answer. I know that when I was eight it was always Paul who stared back at me from the record cover. It was never John or George or Ringo. All other Beatles were invisible to me. All of the harmonies were Paul’s. No-one else sang. Surely Paul McCartney and I would marry. I believed this with all of my heart. I didn’t know that I would grow up and live as close as a neighbor to Sir Paul in East Hampton, and glance at him in local cafes or the yoga studio. 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.” Maybe the split started way back there.
For lunch one day I went out to Central Park and found a high piece of Manhattan shale to perch on. The striations ran in sparkling rivers down away from me 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 bliss. This is where I drank in excess, studied, dreamed, cried, feared — and lost. The Harrison documentary was still with me and I felt 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, when I was alone and broke with all my defenses down. When I had bet it all on love, and lost it all again. In a moment it was so clear to me that 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 bedrock underneath. Relief washed over me. “It’s OK. We all do this. It’s going to be alright.” That’s what’s Georges’ message was to me. Over the years my rage had dissipated enough to hear the truths, even across money and entitlement lines: “It’s not what you’re taking in that matters, it’s what your’e giving out.” How simple.

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Our 1st episode of the Killing Us Softly podcast is up!