I wasn’t in New York on December 8, 1980, the night John Lennon died.
At 10:15 p.m., the time he was murdered in front of the Dakota on West 72nd Street, I was asleep in a rooming house in London.
A high school friend, who was studying with a famous English opera
teacher, invited me to stay with her for a few weeks at the Repton
House in London’s Bloomsbury section, where she was also working as a
chambermaid.
I was en-route to Israel set to spend a year on a kibbutz. My
planned 2-week stay in London turned into more than a month for reasons
I don’t now remember. Perhaps we were were just having too good a time
exploring that city and being on our own in a foreign country.
Most of the guests at the Repton House were foreigners who, for one
reason or another, were living in London for an extended period of
time. The University of London was nearby and there were quite a few
graduate students in the mix. The other chambermaids were young Italian
women from Naples, who were studying English in London.
We got friendly with these women who taught us how to curse in
Italian. One of them, Rosaria, used to say: Porco Dio, which translates
as Pork God. She’d pronounce it dramatically as she railed against the
Repton’s owner who was exploiting the chambermaids terribly.
During my stay at the Repton House, a catastrophic earthquake hit
Naples, and we comforted Rosaria in the chambermaid’s kitchen as she
cried, uncertain of the fate of her family. She finally spoke to her
mother and learned that everyone was okay. She was holding the London
Times, which had a photograph of elderly Italian women in black shawls
mourning the earthquake dead on its cover.
We used to hang out in the chambermaid’s kitchen in the basement of
the hotel, boiling water for tea, which we’d learned to add milk and
sugar to. For dinner, we’d make fried eggs and toast slathered with
plenty of butter and English jam.
Our room was on the top floor with a perfect view of the rooftops of
Bloomsbury. Like an artist’s garret, it felt to me the perfect place to
be an American abroad, keeping copious notes in my journal, writing
letters home, discovering one of the great cities of the world.
On the night of December 8th there was late-night party at the
rooming house. It may have been a party for me as I was leaving the
next morning on a flight to Jerusalem. It was a raucous evening,
running up and down the stairs, going in and out of each other’s rooms.
There must have been wine, food. Surely we played music and danced.
I barely remember anymore what went on. But I do remember there was a
wistful feeling in the air. I wasn’t ready to leave, to go off on my
own to a part of the world I had never been.
We barely slept that night. The party went late and after it ended,
we packed up my things and talked until the first light of dawn.
(Were we awake at the moment of his death? What were we doing? )
On the morning of December 9th, when we went down to the lobby, I
noticed that the woman at the reception desk, a cheerful person who
reminded me of Lulu, the British singer in "To Sir with Love," was
crying. Her dark eye make-up was running; I wondered why she looked so
uncharacteristically sad.
"John Lennon died. He was shot." she said. I thought I was hearing things.
"What did you say? " I said certain that I’d misunderstood.
"John Lennon is dead."
I don’t remember how I found out the rest. My friend and I took the
Underground to Heathrow, where she waited with me to board the plane. A
quiet day at the airport, everyone seemed unaffected by the news. Maybe
it was too early. Little did we know of the crowds in Central Park, on
West 72nd Street, in Hyde Park.
It was the most awful of good byes. Me flying off alone, my friend
returning to a foreign city on her own. John Lennon had been murdered
in Manhattan. What was happening to the world?
We discussed my staying longer. Everything seemed up in the air. But I decided to get
on the plane, to go forward with my plans despite the fact that nothing
was the same.
The flight to Jerusalem passed in an instant; a blur of absence and
regret. I do remember some Hasidic men standing in the aisles praying.
They were davening, moving their upper bodies up and down, while
reciting words from tiny Hebrew prayer books. I remember thinking: Say
a prayer for John.
My first days in Israel, I stayed with a group of counter-culture
Americans who founded a Kibbutz near Jerusalem. They played Beatles
records all day in their one-room houses and wanted to talk to me about
what had happened, what it had been like in London, in New York. I was
a witness from the outside world, but there wasn’t much I could say:
(I woke up in London. Got the terrible news from Lulu. Cried at the
airport. Said good bye to a friend. And flew to Jerusalem in a mournful
daze.)
Weeks later on another kibbutz, I got a letter from my cousin sadly
detailing the
events of the days after John’s death in Manhattan. In her neat, all
lower-case print, she conveyed her loss in words I still remember.
"nothing
seems to matter. john’s dead. a piece of ourselves is gone." My sister
sent me a similarly sad note and clippings from the Times and
the Voice about John, which I cherished.
In my no-frills room at the kibbutz, I read and re-read those
articles my sister sent and relived the details of that night. If I
couldn’t have been there, I still wanted to visualize it all: the taxi,
the street, the hospital, his bloody eyeglasses. Yoko’s look of utter
despair.
(John and Yoko had spent the early part of the evening of December
8th recording Yoko’s single, "Walking on Thin Ice." — "Starting Over:
Lennon’s hit single from his new album, Double Fantasy, had been on the
radio constantly in the chambermaid’s kitchen.)
I wanted, no needed, to know what 72nd Street looked like with those
mournful crowds singing ‘Give Peace a Chance." I tried to imagine those
moments of silence in Central Park when an entire city grieved
together.
All those miles away, all these years away now, it is still so close
— that terrible night. Those awful days after. All these years later
it still hurts.
–written December 8th, 2005