Matthew J. Parker: One of Those Years

We’ve all had one of those days, right? Too many of them. But as an ex-con and junkie, I’ve had one of those years, in fact more than one of one of those years. My worst year by far, however, occurred when I was just a slip of a junkie and still seven years from my first incarceration, after 1979 passed its PCP-laced joint to1980. My then-wife and I as well as our one-year-old son lived in a nice apartment on the Eastside of Bridgeport, Connecticut, where I worked as a tool and die apprentice – a job I enjoyed. 

It was the end of January when my mom called from Arizona. She and our immediate family had moved there some years earlier, and we talked often. But this time, I knew, something was wrong, her voice shaking when she asked if John, my older brother, had a tattoo. 

“No,” I said, followed by, “Why?”

They had found a body in Phoenix, she said, and the cops were convinced it was John. But the body had no tattoos, and my mom had convinced herself that John, like my younger brother Mark and I, had at least one tattoo. I, however, knew better, and told her so. 

“Are you sure, Matthew? Are you sure your brother doesn’t have any tattoos?” She was desperate now, willing me to be wrong, but I was certain. My brother John was dead. Murdered by an idiot over something idiotic.  

Soon after, I left my wife and child, for a number of reasons that are not worth repeating here, aside from the fact that it was mostly my fault. I kept my job while sleeping in a park and simultaneously figuring out that my friends were few. There was this one girl, however, who convinced her mother to let me crash on their couch on occasion. She would then sneak out to make love to me in the dead of night. Tenderly, without so much as a whisper, she became my silent coping mechanism.

Another was my best friend, Pete. Slightly taller and heavier than my scrawny 5’6”, Pete was bikery, like me, and almost as tender, in his genuine concern, as my late-night lover, his empathy no less palpable; was as sure as the feel of sun on skin. 

Things went on this way through the summer, time nibbling away at my grief like a finicky cat, until a Monday evening in mid-September. I had left my tool and die gig and walked to the auto shop where Pete worked. Noticing his car was missing, I asked the other mechanic where he had gotten to.

He was looking up at the car’s engine, his hands buried under the exhaust manifold. “You haven’t heard?” 

“Heard what?”

In answer he walked into the office, picked up a newspaper, walked back out and handed it to me. “The Bridgeport Post” headline announced it like only newspapers can: “Fireman’s Son slain in Shooting.” I read the article slowly. The night before Pete had been killed in an apparent firearm mishap. 

Numb, I bought a six pack and made my way to where my usual group of friends hung out. They were all tripping on Acid. One of them offered me some, but I refused and, after a few muttered condolences – they had all heard, of course – I went and sat by myself, far enough away to where I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone, but not so far where I couldn’t hear the music blasting from someone’s car. Bob Geldof of The Boomtown Rats was singing I don’t like Mondays.

There is a poignantly dark story behind this song which reflected my mood. One of the first school shootings in America occurred on January 29, 1979, when 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer began firing at her San Diego elementary school from her home across the street. Two people were killed, including the school principal, and nine wounded—eight schoolchildren and a police officer. Holed up in her home with a rifle, a birthday gift from her father, a reporter managed to get her on the phone and asked why she had shot up so many. Her reply was a simple, “I don’t like Mondays.” The Boomtown Rats, after hearing about it, wrote the song, which ironically became their only hit. 

I was squatting on my heels, arms resting on thighs, a can of beer held loosely in my right hand and dangling between my knees. My head was bowed, and I could hear the goofy merriment of the LSD revelers, like the sound of indifferent birds who had nothing whatever to do with the dark nest of my thoughts, or the lyrics to the song that was sadly winding down. What reason do you need to die?

As the song ended, I lifted up my head, and there she was, kneeling on the grass before me. She had long brown hair and eyes that shone black in the fading light. Her lips were thick and enticing, with a slight gap between upper and lower, showing a glint of braces. She was dressed in a fringe suede vest and bell bottoms, with moccasins gracing her tiny feet. 

“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said, but I barely heard her. I was frowning because a light had clicked on in my brain, penetrating the dark veils of grief. Seeing my frown, she misconstrued it, and added hastily, “Although I didn’t know him.” 

I nodded, once, handed her one of my beers and held her eye a moment. She returned my look with a frankness that surprised me, then scooted over to sit on my left side. We sat quietly for a while, sharing the six pack and smoking cigarettes. She probably assumed I wanted silence in my grief, but in truth my mind was rushing with untrammeled desire, rivaling the ecstasy of heroin. I wanted this woman. I wanted her so bad that I could have made love to her right there on the hill, in front of everybody. Only one thing prevented me from trying; Pete wasn’t dead twenty-four hours, and the grief I felt for him was being overwritten. Ambivalence plagued me. Was this right? went my thoughts, and how had this little hippie girl so easily thrust aside my grief? 

Finally, after what seemed a very long time, I made a decision, and said, without looking at her, “You have a boyfriend.”

“Yes.”

“Get rid of him.”

A slight pause, then, “O.k.”    

And that was that. She was mine from that moment on. 

Her name was Maria, and when we parted soon after, I was torn between woozy joy and profound grief, and I could not reconcile the two. I was like a condemned man whose sentence of death had just been commuted to life in prison, but the life granted was blackened. John was still dead, and Pete was still dead, and I felt it would be wrong, or indeed impossible, to gather happiness to me. Love had commuted my sentence to life again, but I still floundered in darkness.

A month or so later we rented a ratty apartment from some Hells Angels I knew and had a modicum of normalcy despite my heroin use, which had only been exacerbated by the deaths of both brother and best friend. Then, less than two months later, John Lennon was murdered at The Dakota on 72nd Street and Central Park West. Lost in our misery, Maria, me, and another girl, Spacey Tracey, hitchhiked to New York City to attend the vigil. Cold and windy, I was half sick from heroin withdrawals, but I barely noticed, the sickness of grief overriding even that incessant demand. 

Our third ride dropped us off around Jerome Avenue, just off the Cross Bronx Expressway, and we began walking south. It was about 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, December 14, 1980, and we were attracting a crowd. I was getting worried, but the girls, suffering from their own maladies of loss, were oblivious.

We were stopped by a pimp, the small crowd bunched up behind us. He was puzzled, I could tell, and simply blurted just what in the fuck we thought we were doing in the South Bronx on a Sunday morn?

“Heading to Central Park to attend the vigil for John Lennon,” I said.

“Oh yeah. Heard about that. Fucked up scene, man.” He glanced south, then back at me. “So why don’t you take the subway?”

“No bread.” 

He laughed and, shaking his head, pulled a wad of bills from a front pants pocket and peeled off a 20. “Take the train,” he said. 

He walked us to the subway station then, a few stragglers following behind, although most had dispersed. As we descended the stairs, Maria and Tracy falling all over themselves with genuine thank yous, he added, “And be sure to get these ladies something to eat.”

There was not much to see in the park, just crowds of people standing in the cold, some weeping, others brandishing signs, and still more huddled together. At exactly two o’clock the planned ten minutes of silent tribute began, after which his music was played, but not the songs I wanted to hear. I prefer the darker, Plastic-Ono-band Lennon as opposed to that Paul McCartney-ish pop of the early Beatles or even Double Fantasy, the album released just a month before his death. It’s not pessimism. Not really. Rather, I’m a connoisseur of realism and a treader of darkness. It is indeed paradise to bask in the sun’s rays, just ask any tree you happen upon, but the night also holds its pleasures. Night, after all, is where the stars rise. And fall. 

My brother John and Lennon share a birthday – October 9, a fact which feeds both dark and light. Their combined deaths are the tragic antithesis of birth, made more so by both men’s relative youth. Yet we can also smile and laugh and even fall in love amidst our grief, as the passing of Pete/meeting of Maria has so painstakingly proven. The truth is that the one fed off the other in the same manner that new life sprouts from the rot of death. 

Mark Twain once said: “The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” Sadness is the whetstone of happiness, and often hones it to giddy levels of poignancy, not despite but because of the inherent impermanence of both. One of Lennon’s darkest songs mirrors this:    

I seen through junkies, I been through it all

I seen religion from Jesus to Paul

Don’t let them fool you with dope and cocaine

No one can harm you, feel your own pain

Maria and I eventually split, the heroin falling between us like a guillotine. Placing my lacerated heart in a band aid tin with a cooker and a binky, I ran. Hitchhiked to Arizona like a true child of the 60s, where I became confined in many more ways than one.

Twenty-seven years later, after five stints in prison, the heroin purged from both blood and brain, I returned to New York City to earn my MFA at Columbia. I walked in Central Park almost daily then, from the North Woods to Columbus Circle, despite the weather, as oblivious to the cold as I had been on that Sunday morning in 1980. Wearing just a blue Columbia hoody, I resembled Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man, and made it a ritual to pass by the ornate gables of The Dakota and nearby Strawberry Fields, where I’d occasionally try to blend in with the tourists, which sometimes actually worked. 

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Copyright 2023 Matthew J. Parker

Matthew J. Parker teaches writing at UC Berkeley.