CHAPTER FOUR 

The Event 

“Nobody loves you when you’re down and out. 

Nobody sees you when you’re on cloud nine. 

Everybody’s hustlin’ for a buck and a dime. 

I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine…” 

….John Lennon 

   Was it true? It had to be. Perhaps. Perhaps was a good word for it. It felt real, you know soft to the touch and all, this piece of paper, this… this thing in his hand masquerading as a long, unfolded fortune cookie-thingy. Maybe it was a figment of his imagination – certainly a possibility. It bloody well didn’t come from any cookie though, he was well aware of that. No, this mystery had been yanked from the head of a broken porcelain Beatles’ doll. On it were the words, “I Buried Paul,” along with John Lennon’s signature and his famous squiggly iconic cartoon drawing of his own face. 

   ‘It’s real,’ wisped Connor, ‘My God, that’s… that’s John Lennon’s signature…’ 

   Wes stared at the drawing with wooly contempt. ‘Of course it’s not.’ 

  Wes might have been Connor’s best friend, but what did he know. Fuck him, Connor thought, he’s not a Beatles’ expert like I am. That’s John’s authentic signature. 

   And as sure as Connor was about that, it didn’t negate the equal certainty that perhaps, since his mind was swimming in a fog of psychedelic mayhem, he could be absolutely wrong. Desperate now for answers – or one answer, or even to feel his toes – Connor retraced back over the week. How did he get here? To this spot – with this opportunity – was it an opportunity? It felt like an opportunity. Maybe it was an event. People brave enough to admit they work at a convention center would call it an event, but they call everything an event, like the podiatrist convention. Hells bells and mincemeat pie, that was no event, more of an embarrassment really. Proddy little sex fiends fancying a massage of your feet while dolling out unwanted critiques of your bunions. 

   Connor found it impossible to concentrate. Of course it was hard; he was stoned. Stoned out of his gourd. Stoned like an Inuit inuksuk. Stoned as an old biblical Jew dead for taking the Lord’s name in vain. Stoned is the point I’m trying to get across here, but I have a feeling you get that. 

   ‘If only I didn’t take that extra puff,’ Connor pleaded to the past, a rather useless endeavor considering he had more than enough problems gathering in the present. 

   Nevertheless, he wished desperately to take back control. He had smoked some utterly rad, hippocampus-bending shit, described by the kid who sold it to him as “krunkaholic,” which meant nothing to Connor, but it sure sounded “rad” or at least “rad-lite” – a wily term invented by advertisers to trick buyers into believing they could participate in all the adventures they wanted for only half the calories. 

   Weird how each body part wanted to be on its own little trip. His legs desired to dance. His hands craved to caress his skin, hair, and tongue. And his brain felt like a worm wiggling about on a fishhook – if that worm was asking: “What am I doing here? Why is this sharp pointy thing sticking out of my belly? And is it too late to join a union?” 

     Connor knew from past experience… If I concentrate hard enough, I can step outside this virtual hallucinogenic bubble surrounding me and find reality. He had to try. Yes, indeed, this was the time to snatch back a moment of lucidity where logic and reason held court before drifting back into that joyful netherworld of colorful kaleidoscope art, naked rubber women, and for some reason, on this cockeyed trip, cute, cuddly white kittens. 

   Wait, Connor shouted to himself discovering a moment of inspired remembering. 

   I remember being stoked this week. Indeed, he was quite stoked; it was last Sunday in fact, five days back when he felt he might split a spleen. Well, not exactly – his spleen was in perfectly good working order, but as an idiom it fit the moment. But he did remember being excited. It was an excitement on scale to that glorious day way back in junior high school when he discovered erections – to be more precise, his erection. It was all that slow dancing on that cold wintery eve in British Columbia with Anna Marie Gifford. Lots and lots of rubbing. And all that tartan and leotard. Stairway to Heaven played in the gymnasium. Or was it Supertramp? No matter, it was a magical erection, one of his all-time ten favorites. She, on the other hand, didn’t nearly seem as stoked, rather confused actually: What’s rubbing up against my leotard? It was a simpler time. Now, as a young adult, erections – for obvious reasons – were commonplace to Connor, especially – for reasons still unknown – at the dentists. Indeed, on that splendid Sunday afternoon, five days back, his thrill did not come from a “stiffy,” but from the simple act of finding just the right song on the car radio. His fingers had pushed and massaged and fidgeted across the dial for what felt like eternity – actually a tad under forty-five seconds – but to a youthful, modern Homo sapiens sapiens forty-five seconds was a lifetime. Scientists have termed this phenomenon, or “This contracting time our “youngins” feel…” as smartphone envy. “…A condition manifested by the poor saps perpetually subjected to the Darwinian natural selection of feeling sexually inadequate due to their cell phone always lapsing one model behind what the corporations were marketing, and thus generating the very real fear that they will not get laid anytime soon.” 

   “...I’ve been across to the other side. 

   I’ve shown you everything, I got nothing to hide. 

   And still you ask me, do I love you?

   What it is, what it is…” 

   The sound blaring out from the radio that Sunday in glorious 3-way stereo was John Lennon’s “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out), a tune born on the back of melancholy angst, hitching a sorrowful ride across John’s yearlong separation from Yoko Ono, or what he called his “lost weekend.” Connor knew the song well, after all, he was the ultimate Beatles’ fan. He knew everything about John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Big things like how they were the only artists to hold all five top spots on the Billboard charts at once during the week of April 4th, 1964, or little, minute, unimportant, someone-with-a-life-shouldn’t-know things such as the four vultures in the Disney animated Jungle Book movie were modeled after the four lads. In fact, he possibly knew more about them than they knew about themselves. Sad you might think – spending so much time learning about people you’ve never met. On second thought, isn’t that the description of every history major on the planet – spending yet another weekend alone in their dorm worrying about their merging eyebrow? Silly nobbers. Here’s a thought. They’re dead, you’re not. Go have a life. Besides, history doesn’t repeat itself, stupidity does, and that you can take to the bank. 

   Connor definitely remembered turning the radio louder that Sunday and singing vociferously: ‘Nobody loves you when you’re down and out….’ It was one of John’s post Beatles’ songs, quite apropos for the day’s mood, grabbing Connor’s psyche and cinching it tight, it being meat and potatoes to a “ninety-nine percenter” like himself. Society was reinventing itself yet again, using the “ninety-nine percenter” as its newest in-your-face term to describe the “down-and-outer,” which was already a fairly recent expression used to describe people perpetually looking for ways to make ends meet, which was certainly not new in describing poor people. Keeping his life together was Connor’s daily grind as it was for most Americans since the recession hit. So, it wasn’t hard for him – or anyone for that matter – to identify with the lyrics: “I’ll scratch your back and you knife mine.” 

   So, he sang unabashedly, flexing his uncooperative uvula to hit the high notes: “‘Well, I get up in the morning and I’m looking in the mirror to see, ooo wee!’” 

   Boy it felt good. You know that freedom that comes from belting out a song, loudly, perhaps too loudly – and a tad off-key to anyone with a sense of pitch, or a pair of ears? To a Killer Whale in heat Connor might have made a sale, but to a human… well, let’s just say music made him happy, so it mattered little if he could carry a tune – which he could not. I mean, really, his singing was on par to a Scotsman’s – which is equivalent to a guy squealing in pain as his leg is hacked off on the battlefield while simultaneously having his back hair waxed – (please see Rod Stewart’s “Do You Think I’m Sexy” for reference). 

   The lyrics, though, by some mysterious rendering jiggled a few memory cells into a vibrato of action. Suddenly, Connor remembered what he forgot to remember. 

   ‘Ah, crap!’ he blurted out that Sunday as his right cerebral cortex throbbed from the few rebel cells protesting having to work on a weekend. 

   Wes, lounging in the passenger seat, swiveled his head leftward unfazed by the sudden “blurtation” – if I can use that term, and I think I can. He tried to read Connor’s face – not an easy task even at the best of times since Connor was wearing his usual just sucked on a lemon taut expression. Though they were best buds, since the ninth grade when Connor moved to California – (even shared a sleeping bag camping once – purely platonic – so they told everyone) – Wes was not the most astute when it came to picking up Connor’s subtle nuances – or anyone’s for that matter. No doubt a fatal flaw at the heart of his girlfriend problem – and conceivably why he was an unemployed mathematician. Nevertheless, Wes instinctually rendered from Connor’s tone that the problem did not rate on the “should I be worried scale?” though he still asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ 

   ‘I forgot my camera.’ 

   Connor knew exactly where too – on the bloody kitchen counter where he placed it for the specific reason of not wanting to forget it. ‘Damn.’ 

   ‘What’s wrong with your phone?’ 

   ‘It’s a piece of shit.’ Connor sighed feeling his penis shrivel directly proportional to the smartphone envy he was now experiencing. ‘Takes horrible photos, too. I should buy an iPhone.’ He was hoping by some miraculous act of the Gods – whom he didn’t believe in – that by just saying it out loud it would come true. 

   ‘You got the money for it?’ 

   ‘Not really.’ 

   ‘Well, there you go,’ offered Wes, suggesting exactly that and nothing more. Connor stole a glance over at his friend now leaning bleakly up against the car window. He hated that saying, “There you go.” It was so defeatist, so insouciant, so… Winnipeg. 

   “There you go.” Fuckin’ obnoxious. To Connor it was capitulation to the negative: life’s little saying of acceptance, of giving in to the powers to be, giving into the Gods, to nature, to “the man.” 

   Who are these people, these ne’er-do-wells who never fight for theirs except for petty unimportant things? I’ll tell you who. They’re the ones who accept that bullshit bank fee charged to customers when they’re only one day late in paying their credit card bill. He called the saying the “shrug off,” coming from the “Oh well, what can I do?” people. There’s plenty you can bloody well do. 

   He was fuming if only in the angst of his own melancholic stew. Call the damn company up. Talk to the impossible to understand customer relations person from India, or the Philippines, or Arizona who all struggle with the English language, yet coincidently all have terrifically simple Anglophile names such as Smith, or Betty, or Hank from Bangladesh. Really? Bangladesh? Hank? 

   Connor knew he was exactly like one of those “Oh well, what can I do?” types and it embarrassed him so. He also couldn’t believe he laid out “thirty-frigging-dollars” for getting his Visa payment in one day past its due date. 

   Idiot. 

   He called himself that a lot these days. Hardships had been piling up over the past year – or three – since the economic downturn. Balls, he thought, pull your head out of your ass. Today’s a day to celebrate life. To celebrate the best music of all time. 

   And indeed it was. For that Sunday was a special Sunday, the one day of the year he looked forward to more than any other – more than Christmas, or Hanukkah, or New Year’s, or his birthday. Hell, it was even better than Masturbation Day, a splendid holiday he and his college buddies – a motley crew of music lovers, video game connoisseurs, and chronic masturbators – invented to replace the vile and detestable Groundhog Day. His posse, seven in all, went about calling themselves, unimaginatively, the Group of Seven, and along with many other poorly thought out and overly opinionated ideas – like calling themselves the Group of Seven – they felt deeply that the Germans had no right to invent any ritualistic holiday that undermined physics, geology, or shadow watching. Indeed, how a groundhog, badger, or any other woodland creature could prognosticate the weather was mind-bogglingly beyond the pale. In fact, it was as realistic as whipping out one’s own penis to decide if spring was about to be sprung. So, they did exactly that – every February 2nd. If their penis saw its own shadow they would masturbate six more weeks. It made no sense, they knew that. Nevertheless, for vivid reasons I need not explain, Masturbation Day happily caught on at all the college fraternities. * 

   But as pretty darn special as Masturbation Day was, it could not hold a candle to that Sunday. For every year, for the past five, Connor had bought tickets to the Starlight Bowl in Burbank, California, where the world’s best and truest Beatles’ tribute band – the Fab-4 – held a marvelous concert. These guys were huge – just not in height. They were in fact quite tiny. However, they sang like the Beatles, spoke like the Beatles, looked like the Beatles – albeit they were a lot shorter – really, they were abnormally small for rockers. Even the faux Paul played bass left-handed like the real one – now that exemplified dedication to your craft. But to Connor, it was bliss: two glorious hours of pretending to be in the audience listening to the real deal, the genuine Beatles, yet better. At the Starlight Bowl he was not only going to hear the group’s earlier songs – just like they played back in the mid-sixties – but at this concert, the Fab-4 rather politely sang all the way to the end of Abbey Road, the Beatles’ last magnificent album. These were brilliant tunes never played live by the real lads themselves after they impolitely stopped performing in 1966. And all of this majestic music played, gloriously, without the annoying screaming from teenyboppers. 

     Like Mecca to the Muslims, or the Vatican to the Catholics, or a nice Chinese restaurant to the Jewish people, this was Connor’s pilgrimage, his jubilee, and as close to a religious experience as he ever wanted. If there was a heaven, which Connor did not believe in – an important prerequisite for being an atheist – then this surely was it, God’s little gift to mankind – the world’s greatest rock and roll band ever – the Beatles.

   * The biggest struggle for the Group of Seven was deciding if they should be using their individual penises to see the shadow or a collective one, though they had already renounced the largest collective penis of all time – the Bible.