Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [199]
She was right. I ran away. I couldn’t help her, and I couldn’t stand watching her die. I wanted to be as far from family as I could.
If I had her now, I would call or see her every day. I would ask her things. I would tell her how much I love her, for what she endured and for trying to save me.
But I don’t have her—I have only old photos and her voice on some tapes. I will never talk to her or see her again.
IN DECEMBER 1980, JOHN LENNON, the former leader of the Beatles, was shot to death as he was entering his apartment building in New York City. When I heard the news, I went and visited with a friend of mine, Jim Henke, who was also my editor at Rolling Stone. We watched the news coverage, and we talked late into the after-midnight hours. It was hard to comprehend. Lennon’s murder seemed such a terrible payoff for a man who had helped form such a wonderful legacy, and who had enriched our lives beyond measure. It was as if a part of our past had been transformed and ruined, finished in bloodshed. Maybe I should have been accustomed to such endings, but I wasn’t. When I looked at Len non’s murder, I thought about the horrible murders that Gary had committed, and the terrible, mysterious way that Gaylen had been killed. Murder was a way of ending somebody’s—anybody’s—life story. It could come from anywhere, anytime. And it would not only end a life, but could also undermine every good memory or achievement that life had accomplished. I was tired of the ruin that came from killing, but that made no difference. Individual murders could be solved or punished, but murder itself, of course, could never be solved. That could not be done without solving the human heart, and without solving the history that has rendered that heart so dark and desolate.
The day after Lennon was shot, my mother called me at my home in Los Angeles. “I wanted to see how you were doing,” she said. “I know you loved this man very much. I know you must be hurting.”
She was a remarkable person. I knew it even in the moments when I wanted to be as far away from her as possible. My mother knew what loss was, she knew what it meant. It had destroyed her, but not so much that she couldn’t do something like this—calling her son after a hero of his had died, and letting him know she still cared for him and his hurt. On the phone with my mother that day, I was able to do something I wasn’t able to do with anyone else: I cried over John Lennon’s murder, and the way it had ravaged a certain treasured part of my past.
At the end of our conversation, my mother made an offer. Actually, it was probably more of a plea. “Why don’t you come home for Christmas?” she asked. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you. Sometimes it seems we’re hardly a family anymore. Ever since Gary died, it’s like it’s hard for the three of us to be in the same room together. But there won’t be many more Christmases that I get to see any of my sons. Won’t you come home this year?”
I went home. I spent that Christmas with my mother and brother. In many ways it was a good visit, in many ways a disheartening one. By now, my mother’s health was the worst I’d ever seen it. She sat in her chair at the kitchen table, dressed in her age-old bathrobe. She stayed there the whole time, like a frightened animal that adopts a spot as its safety zone and will not venture from it.
At one point, Frank went out for a long walk, and that was the time my mother told me some of the horrible stories that I would never forget—such as the story about her father forcing her to watch a hanging that had never happened. “You were wise to go away,” she told me that day. “I miss you terribly, but you were wise. There is some curse that has devoured us one by one, and before long it will take me too. But living so far away, maybe it will never find you. I want you to be the one of us who is forever safe. I don’t want anything