John Lennon was shot dead at 10:50 pm on Monday, December 8, 1980. I had gone to bed the evening before listening to the first side of "Double Fantasy." When my mother came and woke me up for school on Tuesday morning, she immediately told me what had happened. My first odd thought was, "Did Yoko do it?"
I grew up with parents who didn't like each other at all. They divorced when I was 12. Their dis-ease with each other was obvious, but as a kid I lived with it, and with the some-time violence, but without feeling a sense of horror regarding the entire world.
I first discovered the Beatles and my favorite John Lennon when I was 15, in the summer of 1980. A local radio station was playing all of the Beatles' songs, and a local TV station was running the few Beatles movies. I felt happy when listening and watching. That same summer, I was sent to visit my father in South Dakota. He was awful to me. But while in South Dakota, I heard "Instant Karma" on the radio for the first time. When I got back to Texas, I found out that John Lennon was coming out with his first album in 5 years: "Double Fantasy." Released in November. When I first heard the album in full--at midnight, on a local rock station---I didn't love it at all. In fact, I remember thinking that it would now be sad to have to "leave" Lennon-fandom after all of these months... I bought the album anyway, and listened to it constantly anyway...
John Lennon's shooting on December 8, 1980, introduced me to a very strange feeling that I'd never experienced before. Like I said above, I'd been through awful things as a child, but I'd always somehow just been an observer, and I could consciously say to myself: "My father is behaving terribly" or "My mother is behaving terribly." And I didn't love either of them ("They're not on your side," a voice once said to me), so whatever they were doing wasn't so terrible because they had nothing to do with ME. But I LOVED John Lennon. And when he was shot dead, a weird psychological sense of horror ran through me for the first time. The world, the sky were not the same. This particular sense of horror didn't last more than two or three months at the time. But it came back later over and over again. Lennon's death introduced me to this horrific, other-worldly rift.
RINGS
once I walked in clear blue sky
waiting for the bus
my cheek against the ice-cold pane
Mama didn't work
she watched me at the stop
tearing the curls
she spent all morning fixing
who liked my dress?
all the boys, Mama
they give me their nickels
their jackets to wear
Raymond, Danny, Sylvester
we fly kites together
they walk me home
giving me rings
to wear forever
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