The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  * * *

  John invites Paul to play a gig with the Quarry Men at New Clubmoor Hall in Norris Green, the northern part of Liverpool—a good distance by bus from where they all live.

  They open with “Guitar Boogie” by Arthur Smith and His Cracker-Jacks. The guitar solo is easy to play, a simple twelve-bar. But not only is this Paul’s first time playing with the band, it’s also his first guitar solo ever.

  Onstage, John and Paul take turns singing. When one leads, the other harmonizes. John’s strength is holding the lower key; Paul’s voice is more suited for the higher range.

  Paul starts his guitar solo.

  His fingers won’t move. It’s like they’re stuck to the fret board.

  Paul fights his way through it until his round face is flushed. Wet.

  After the show, everyone is looking at him, and he’s frightened. Yet he’s resolute on one point. “It wiped me out as a lead guitar player, that night,” Paul says. “I never played lead again onstage.”

  * * *

  John is in his bedroom, composing a poem on his portable typewriter, when he hears a knock on the back door, off the kitchen.

  Mimi calls up the stairs: “John, your little friend’s here.”

  She uses this patronizing tone with all his friends. “I thought John and Mimi had a very special relationship,” Paul later says. “She would always be making fun of him and he never took it badly; he was always very fond of her, and she of him.” Even though she “would take the mickey,” Paul says, “I never minded it, in fact I think she quite liked me—out of a put-down I could glean the knowledge that she liked me.”

  Mimi thinks Paul is the one “taking the mickey out” of her with his posh accent. “I thought, ‘He’s a snake charmer all right,’ John’s little friend, Mr. Charming. I wasn’t falling for it.”

  John enters the kitchen and finds Paul McCartney standing there, Mimi eyeing the guitar in Paul’s hand and reminding them both to keep the noise down and not bother her student lodgers.

  The University of Liverpool students Mimi takes in to supplement her widow’s state pension don’t interest John, though he’s also earned a place at the Liverpool College of Art after a portfolio review of his cartoons and caricatures. Maybe I can get a job drawing gorgeous girls for toothpaste posters is his thought.

  “We’ve got this song, Mimi, do you want to hear it?” John asks his aunt.

  “Certainly not,” Mimi scoffs. “Front porch, John Lennon, front porch.”

  John closes the door, telling Paul that he likes it out on the porch “as the echo of the guitars bounce[s] nicely off the glass and the tiles.”

  The moment Mimi leaves the house, they race upstairs and play Little Richard records. They both worship the singer from Macon, Georgia, and Paul can even mimic those trademark hollers and screams on “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally.”

  But Elvis Presley is God, and they are his acolytes. They don’t just play Elvis records—they also analyze them, trying to figure out the chord progressions, every single sound. All the rock songs they know are played with C, F, and G or G7. They’re determined to crack the chords to Elvis’s “Blue Moon,” but it’s not until early winter that they discover that C, A minor, F, and G are the exact same chords Paul Anka used in his hit “Diana,” recorded in 1957, when he was fifteen, the same age as Paul.

  John’s excitement is so fierce, so intense, that it’s nearly blinding. It confirms what he’s known all along: music is the reason he was put on this earth.

  And he’s going to do music with Paul McCartney.

  Chapter 3

  Help me get my feet back on the ground.

  —“Help!”

  Paul walks home, still riding the high of finally cracking the chord progression for “Blue Moon.” He prefers riding his bicycle, but he can’t do that when he brings his guitar, since it doesn’t have a case.

  His father still has no idea he’s hanging out with John Lennon, but it doesn’t matter, really, whether his dad likes John. They’re friends now. Musical brothers in arms.

  John, of course, knows how Jim McCartney feels about him. John gives Paul some cleverly worded advice: Face up to your dad! Tell him to fuck off!

  He’s thinking about it.

  Paul wishes he could find a way, some combination of words, to explain to his father just how deep John is. Not only in his passion for music but also in his art. That John composes poetry; that he could be a great writer.

  Paul takes a shortcut via the Allerton Municipal Golf Course, which is closed for the season.

  Paul is good at the guitar. And he’s pretty good at singing. But playing and singing…that takes practice. And what a better place than the middle of an empty golf course?

  Paul stops walking to listen. A couple of times, people have caught him, and when they do, he immediately stops playing and starts walking.

  But right now, in the pitch black, he’s pretty sure he’s alone. He straps the guitar over his shoulder and, in his mind’s eye, sees himself stepping onstage, in front of thousands of people. The crowd goes wild, clapping and screaming his name.

  Paul steels himself. Summons his nerves.

  He starts to play.

  Sings.

  The crowd roars in approval. The women are hysterical. Some have fainted.

  Paul is getting into a good rhythm, singing at the top of his voice, when he hears someone behind him shout: “Hey!”

  Paul stops playing.

  Whips around and sees a man—a policeman—approaching him.

  Oh, God, I’m going to get arrested for a breach of the peace.

  “Was that you I heard playing the guitar?”

  Paul considers lying, even though it’s crystal clear he’s been caught red-handed.

  Even as his heart pounds, he decides to go with the truth.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The policeman, tall and burly, towers over him. If he gets arrested, what will he tell his dad?

  “Can you give me guitar lessons?” the man asks.

  Chapter 4

  I was so much older then

  I’m younger than that now.

  —“My Back Pages”

  John and Paul’s new project is to crack the intro to Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day.”

  They’ve been going at it for weeks.

  The friends sit in chairs, practically toe to toe, and watch each other play guitar. It’s like “holding a mirror up” between the left-handed Paul and the right-handed John.

  John rarely goes to class. When he does, he’s outspoken. Rebellious. Argumentative and stubborn.

  “I was aggressive because I wanted to be popular,” John later says. “I wanted to be the leader…I wanted everybody to do what I told them to do, to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss.”

  At Liverpool College of Art, some classmates and teachers like him, though many despise him.

  But no one ignores him.

  Still, he is most in his element at the “eyeball to eyeball” sessions he and Paul undertake at Paul’s empty home. Every weekday except Mondays, Paul cuts school at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, and they take the green double-decker 86 bus—sitting up top, outside, so they can smoke.

  John finds the well-worn furniture, with its protruding springs hidden by cotton covers, comforting and warm—much more like his mum’s than Mimi’s more austere house. John takes a seat and removes his glasses from his pocket.

  Paul is staring at him.

  You never knew I wore glasses because I never wear them. When he started having vision problems, Mimi took John to the eye doctor. The other kindergartners ridiculed the thick lenses needed to correct his severe nearsightedness, though, and he still refuses to wear his glasses in public.

  But he feels comfortable with Paul, who’s like a younger brother. One who’s insanely talented, ambitious, and determined.

  They go at the chords over and over.

  John works his guitar until he
nails the intro.

  To celebrate, Paul lights up his dad’s spare pipe with a pinch of tobacco they find in the tea caddy.

  John takes a puff and thinks, Practically every Buddy Holly song is three chords. We should write our own.

  Though John ignored Paul the first time he talked about his songwriting techniques, now he’s curious and draws him out.

  Paul starts at the beginning. “I’d either sit down with a guitar or at the piano,” he says, “and just look for melodies, chord shapes, musical phrases, some words, a thought just to get started with.”

  John wants in on this creative process, but it doesn’t take long for him to discover that songwriting is hard.

  Their first collaboration, “Too Bad About Sorrows,” remains incomplete, as does their follow-up, “Just Fun.” The next one they work on, “Because I Know You Love Me So,” has a Buddy Holly feel to it. They’ve already worked out the harmony.

  Paul turns to a fresh page in his notebook to start a new song. Up at the top, he writes, “Another Lennon-McCartney Original.”

  * * *

  “I’ve got a mate who can play ‘Raunchy,’” Paul says. Bill Justis’s “Raunchy” is a recent hit from America and a tricky instrumental to cover. Being able to play it is a sign of a really good guitarist.

  “Who?”

  “George Harrison.”

  Right. Little George Harrison. John has met him, that small kid with a thick mop of hair who’s still fourteen, eight months younger than Paul and a class below him at Liverpool Institute.

  Still, Paul keeps talking his mate up. In addition to his rock-solid guitar skills, Paul tells John, Little George is cool. He even dresses cool—sometimes outrageously, to get a rise out of the adults. “Cocky” is the word Paul uses to describe him, approvingly.

  But John isn’t swayed from his opinion that “George was just too young.”

  “I didn’t dig him on first sight,” John says later. “George looked even younger than Paul, and Paul looked about ten with his baby face.”

  On February 6, 1958, the Quarry Men are playing Wilson Hall, sharing the bill with the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group. (Clayton is the lead guitarist, backed by a drummer named Ringo Starr.)

  After the show, John challenges George.

  “John said if I could play like that, I could join them,” George recalls.

  Paul remains George’s champion. “Go on, George, show him!”

  George aces the audition. “I played ‘Ranchee’ [sic] for them, and he said I could join.”

  John agrees that George “knew more chords, a lot more, than we knew.”

  He’s still a bit embarrassed to be seen with a fourteen-year-old, though. But he’s even more appreciative of strength in numbers, calculating, “Now there were three of us.”

  Chapter 5

  When I cannot sing my heart

  I can only speak my mind…

  —“Julia”

  At a party celebrating Commonwealth Day, John and his band play on the back of a parked coal lorry. As he sings and plays, he sees three members of his family standing in the crowd.

  His mum, Julia, and his younger half sisters—Julia, who shares Mum’s name, and Jacqui—are the best kind of fans, singing along with him, shouting and screaming their praises. Julia acts more like a friend than his mother.

  John still feels a bit like an outsider with them and Bobby Dykins, Julia’s common-law husband, though he’s comfortable enough at their house, on 1 Blomfield Road, to be there visiting on Tuesday, July 15, while Julia’s off spending time with Mimi.

  John is still waiting for Julia’s return at nearly 10:00 p.m. With his sisters asleep upstairs, it’s just John and Dykins when a knock comes at the door.

  It’s a policeman, who looks directly at John.

  “Are you Julia Dykins’s son?” the constable asks.

  “Yes,” John mumbles.

  “I’m sorry to tell you your mother’s dead.”

  * * *

  Julia has been struck by a car while crossing Menlove Avenue to catch the bus home. Mimi went in the ambulance with her to Sefton General, and John and Bobby Dykins race over to the hospital, but when they arrive, John waits outside.

  He can’t bring himself to go in and say good-bye.

  We’d caught up so much, me and Julia, John thinks. We could communicate. We got on. She was great.

  The grief turns over to rage. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. That’s really fucked everything. I’ve no responsibilities to anyone now.

  * * *

  Julia’s funeral, at Allerton Cemetery, is real and yet not real.

  The man who killed her was a student driver and off-duty policeman named Eric Clague, who is acquitted of all charges. The only punishment the man receives is a short suspension from duty.

  When the verdict’s read, Mimi looks at Clague and shouts, “Killer!”

  John thinks of Julia, buried and all alone in the ground.

  The awful finality shatters him.

  Mother, you had me, but I never had you.

  December 6, 1980

  Mark checks in to the YMCA. The clerk might say he’s a regular. He stayed here last month. He had flown in to kill Lennon.

  The rooms are only $16.50 a night. He could afford to stay a while, scope out the Dakota.

  The doorman at the apartment building didn’t give his name, but Mark heard someone call him Jay. Jay is a Beatles fan, too. The man is also a liar. Last month, Jay told Mark that Mr. Lennon was “out of town.” Then Mark saw Lennon and Yoko’s picture on the front page of the New York Times.

  That’s when he went out to the movies and saw that stupid film, Ordinary People. Mark likes to think of himself as anything but ordinary, but then he had so closely identified with Timothy Hutton’s character that he felt like making a confession, the way Hutton did to his psychiatrist.

  Mark doesn’t have a shrink, doesn’t need one, so he did the next best thing: he went to a pay phone and called his wife. She’s Japanese, like Yoko.

  I’m coming home, he whispered. Then he looked around, making sure no one could overhear, and said the words out loud for the first time. I came to New York to kill John Lennon.

  Come home, Gloria told him. Come home.

  I’m coming home. Your love has saved me. I’m not going to do this.

  Now Mark has no intention of returning home. This time he’s committed to his goal. Lennon’s death will prove to the world, once and for all, that the man is a phony. A liar and a sinner.

  Gloria believes he has returned to New York to find himself, that he wants to write a children’s book. She believes him—obeys him, grants his every desire. Gloria believes everything he tells her because she is a good Christian woman and does what she’s told.

  * * *

  Safely tucked inside his YMCA room, with its single bed and black-and-white TV, Mark double-checks the lock on the door. Then he turns to his suitcase and removes the gun—a .38 caliber Charter Arms. It’s very similar to the snub-nosed Smith & Wesson handguns used by undercover police. The perfect weapon to use for assassination.

  He knows how to handle a weapon. He put in plenty of hours on the range to get certified so that he could carry a .22 when he worked security. He knows how to get in a combat stance and how to sight a target.

  Soon the world will know they’re dealing with an expert killer.

  There was a time when he preached against guns and violence. Lennon, ironically, was the inspiration for his awakening.

  The Beatles are bigger than Jesus, Lennon boasted.

  He took Jesus’s side. Took shelter, too, in the spiritual laws of the Christian faith. Took up a life of purpose, starting at the Chapel Woods Presbyterian Church in Snellville, Georgia.

  Guns, he told people, were evil. But he soon realized the error of his ways. Speaking is only a weak form of doing.

  He had to do more, much more, than converting neighbors and leaving pamphlets in local restaurants. He took a job as a missionary
with the YMCA’s International Camp Counselor Program in Lebanon—until civil war broke out, brought him back home. In Lebanon he found even greater purpose as a first responder on the front lines of the wreckage of conflict.

  The sights of Palestinian gunmen killing four people at a Christian church in East Beirut, militant leaders killing thirty Palestinian supporters on a bus, played on a permanent loop in his brain. As a counselor at a Vietnamese refugee camp, day after day he listened to stories of families being slaughtered and Vietnamese women being raped by American soldiers.

  Or half listened, because he couldn’t wait to speak his piece, set them on the right path. He taught them the ways of revenge—how to make themselves even stronger than their persecutors.

  While he was sharing his strength, what was Lennon doing? Nothing. Living the life of a pampered celebrity inside the walls of the Dakota.

  He told us to imagine no possessions. He’s done the reverse. There he is, with millions of dollars and yachts and farms and a country estate, laughing at people like me who had believed the lies and bought the records and built a big part of our lives around his music.

  Lennon’s lyrics about peace and love—it’s all bullshit. Lennon admitted as much in a recent article. All his work for peace—the bed-ins and concerts—were essentially put-ons. They were phony, fake, publicity-grabbing schemes.

  A mirror hangs on a nearby wall. Mark stands in front of it, sees his double chin and his round, moon-shaped face. Sees the faint traces of a man who had once believed in Lennon and the Beatles and God and Jesus.

  That person is dead. That person died last month, the day he quit his security job and signed out as “John Lennon.”

  Mark backs up until he can see his chest and torso. He slips the .38 into his jacket pocket, covers the gun with his hand.

  Practices withdrawing the weapon and dropping into a combat stance. Does it again and again until he feels confident that he can remove the weapon in one smooth motion.