by Jimmy Webb
“Jim, I already know the time,” Harry replied in a hoarse conspiratorial whisper.
“Funny stuff.” I propped up on one elbow.
“Jim, I’m coming over with John.”
“John who?”
“John Lennon.”
“Right. Yank the other one.” I hung up and burrowed deeply into my goose down pillows.
By and by, the gate phone awakened me again.
“Jim, it’s Harry and John.”
“No, I’m not going anywhere with you,” I protested, but leaned over and hit the button to open the gate.
I was still lying there, and very near resuming my nap when I heard someone pounding energetically on the kitchen door. I wrapped myself in a bathrobe, unsteadily navigated the steep stairs, and managed to push the heavy sliding door to one side. The first photons of diffused early light filtered through the titans of rock ’n’ roll in the stained glass windows, including Lennon in cross-legged meditative pose. I walked yawning to the back door and saw the hulking figure of Harry Nilsson in a raincoat peering through a window in the kitchen door.
“Jim, we’ve been in a bit of scrape,” Harry said. He was agitated and looking nervously outside. There was a limo sitting in the driveway.
“We?”
“I’ve got John Lennon out here.”
It was an incredibly interesting fact but I was not an autograph hound.
“Bring him in.”
“He wants to stay in the car.”
I laughed hysterically.
“You think I’m going to fall for that?” I knew suddenly, with no reasonable doubt, that there were two hookers in the back of the car. I rushed outside and swung the rear door open, sticking my head inside. In the far corner of the compartment, looking small and owlish in his round specs, his white soft hands folded in his lap, was John Lennon.
“Hello, John.”
“Jim,” he acknowledged with a nod.
“Jim, we have a favor to ask,” Harry said from behind me.
I carefully closed the limo door. Harry and I walked back into the house and on the way upstairs he explained his dilemma. In the late evening the night before he and John had gotten swacked on brandy and cocaine and, popping amyl nitrates like party favors, had gone to Doug Weston’s Troubadour to see the Smothers Brothers in concert. Apparently the show wasn’t as funny as the pair had expected and they started to heckle the Smothers Brothers. Lifetime fans turned on the hecklers. Tom and Dick defended themselves and tried to regain control of the stage. In the confusion John, for some unknown reason, went to the ladies lavatory and purchased a sanitary napkin from a wall dispenser. He managed to attach this to his forehead.
He returned to the table and he and Harry continued to insult the talent in spite of being told to shut up by a waitress. Witnesses reported that Lennon in a rare witless moment had shouted at her, “Don’t you know who the fuck I am?” to which she replied, “You’re some asshole with a Kotex on his head.”
At this point Harry, being the designated caregiver (a danger sign), recognized the need to flee the premises immediately. As Harry and John pushed their way through the narrow passageway leading to the alley a woman stepped up from John’s left and raised a flash camera for a close-up. John, according to who you chance to ask: 1. Didn’t do anything; 2. Inadvertently pushed her; 3. Punched her in the face and broke her camera.
“So?” I asked Harry.
“We need you to ride downtown with us to John’s attorney’s office before the newspapers come out and sit for a deposition. John needs you to swear that you saw the whole thing and that John didn’t hit anyone. That’s the key thing, Jim, he didn’t hit anyone.” He paused and took in a breath or two.
“Fuck no,” I said. “I wasn’t there.”
“Jim, if you don’t help us out John’s going to get sent back to Britain. The feds have a hard-on for him.”
“Going back to Britain isn’t like going to the electric chair, Harry. They have women there and daffodils and cozy little pubs.”
He stood and fixed me with a reproachful gaze.
“Do it for Derek. Do it for peace. Do it for The Beatles,” he said, but he could not keep a straight face.
“I’m a bigger idiot by half than both of you put together,” I said, pulling on jeans and a fresh T-shirt while Harry laughed with glee. Slipping into well-worn sneakers and tying them snug while sitting on my bed, I insisted on combing my hair and brushing my teeth, especially if I was going to lie through them.
We drove downtown from Campo, which was a schlep by any standard. Early morning traffic was crowding onto the Hollywood Freeway on-ramps. John sat impassively, quite noticeably gray of complexion. He said little. He looked like a man in a lot of trouble.
“That cunt,” he said suddenly to no one. “I didn’t touch her fucking camera.” That this wasn’t exactly a clear-cut denial did not escape me.
I was still groggy when I walked into a suite of high-priced offices downtown where a coven of somber besuited men sat in intense conversation. I was deposed and asked if I had been to the Troubadour the night before. A court stenographer waited with her curious little keyboard.
“Yes,” I said with a somber and sober demeanor.
“Did you, Mr. Webb, see Mr. Lennon exiting the Troubadour night club?”
“Absolutely.”
“Yes or no, please, Mr. Webb,” I was admonished.
“Sure. I was with him.”
“Mr. Webb, did you see Mr. Lennon strike any person, or lay his hands on another person in any manner whatsoever?”
“No, I didn’t see him strike anyone.” Which was the absolute truth.
We rode the elevator down in silence and it occurred to me that John Lennon hadn’t bothered to look at me since I set out on this mission to save his bacon. A thank-you or conspiratorial wink would have been nice.
They drove me home. In odd fits of conversation that seemed to be taking place internally, Lennon fumed about the government and the unfair treatment he had received. There was to be no meeting of minds. There would be no expressions of gratitude. There was a great deal missing in the simple exercise of common courtesy.
They let me out at the kitchen door and John nodded again like a pontiff. I had done no more than was expected in that rarified dimension where The Beatles lived by their own special rules.
“Thanks, Jim,” said Harry, walking me to the door. He knew it was a minor indignity but he also knew I had to do it.
“Get the fuck out of here and take your asshole with you,” I mocked gently. The poor limo driver, looking like he was at the end of a sixteen-hour shift, set his bleary eyes on the road and drove them away. What was it about The Beatles that commanded such perilous loyalty at any price, and without any noticeable gratitude?
The charges filed by a female photographer quietly disappeared after a couple of weeks when the D.A. dismissed any action for “lack of evidence.” Larry Kane wrote in his biography: “John was lucky.”
Their mutually destructive aerial ballet temporarily preserved, John and Harry went into the studio with the brilliant but dangerously unpredictable Phil Spector. In an argument with David Geffen at A&M, five-foot-five Spector had lifted Geffen off the floor by his throat and pinned him against the wall. Geffen had tried to prevent Spector from taking control of a Joni Mitchell session. Spector then threatened him with a loaded gun.
It would be hard to exaggerate the level of drug use during the Lennon/Nilsson/Spector project. Harry came into my house one of those nights and spit a handful of blood into my kitchen sink. I was shocked. Not like a little old lady would have been shocked, but shocked as in deeply concerned for his vocal cords. I asked him about his voice.
“I left it on the microphone,” he said with a laugh. Nilsson’s tenor was a special gift, a mellifluous instrument with an unfettered agility and multiple layers of emotional nuance. John, on the other hand, had less to lose.
In the days that followed, the world seemed
to grow dark. I was deeply unhappy without Rosemarie. I unabashedly turned to increased doses of drink and drugs in an attempt to alleviate my depression. I was urged by friends and family to “get some help” but found it difficult to surrender to a head doctor. My father was the man who had cured a particularly nasty abscess in his molar by going out to the garage and resorting to a pair of pliers out of his toolbox. I was his son.
It didn’t seem to matter that she showed up again. The Watergate hearings had started and Hollywood was glued to the screen. She said we could have mimosas and watch them together. I may have been less than enthusiastic about the idea. She came anyway and hinted she would like to have a television at the pool in homage to the increasingly fine weather. Garth managed to wire up a big screen at the pool specifically for Rosemarie to watch Watergate. When she complained she couldn’t see the picture properly, he was charged with constructing a kind of hood over the set so direct sunlight could not impinge on the screen. I once had reveled in gratifying her extravagance but I no longer got the same charge. I knew she would be gone in a few days with little or no explanation. Rosemarie means “remembrance.” It seems as though I thought of her constantly at the expense of recalling anything else clearly.
The phone rang in my darkened bedroom where I had fallen asleep after restless hours around two or three o’clock in the morning. I rolled over cursing, trying to locate the phone. I found it under the bed.
“Jim.” It was Harry’s hoarse voice.
“No,” I snapped. “That is a preemptive unilateral no.”
“We’re down at a hotel on the beach in Venice.”
“Don’t care.”
“John is having some problems. The photographers are chasing us around.”
“I can’t hear you.” I made static noises at the back of my throat.
“Jim, I just need a little favor. You’re still up, right?”
“The house is crowded with people, can’t leave, you know.”
He ignored me. “Do you happen to have any hundred-dollar bills?”
“I just want to check and make sure that you just asked me if I have any hundred-dollar bills at three o’clock in the morning … (static) … sorry, just thought I … (static)”
“Unfortunately we are also out of wampum and we can’t just go out into the street.”
“What, are you guys grafted together now?” I complained.
“So it boils down to this. We want you, Jimmy Webb, to bring hundred-dollar bills and some hee haw down to Venice. Please. Do it for peace.”
“Fuck you.”
“Please. It’s urgent, we have no cash.”
I was wide awake by then so it didn’t seem to matter as much.
“I’ve taken the tiny liberty of sending my chauffeur over to your house. He should be there anytime,” Harry wheedled. The gate phone extension lit up and started beeping.
“You can tell his nibs that you sons of bitches have steel bollocks to do this to me again. I’m a respected member of the community, not your pusher.”
“Right. Thanks, Jim, I knew we could depend on you!”
In the background there was a hysterical burst of laughter that sounded distinctly feminine. I made no obeisance to hygiene save swirling a mouthful of Listerine for two circuits and spitting it into the sink. I opened the secret door in the lazaret behind the bar and dialed the combination into my safe. I had road money in there and I was able to find ten or twelve hundred-dollar bills and an eighth of an ounce of the best cocaine in a clear polyurethane envelope. I walked out into the driveway to find the chauffeur standing rigid as a bridegroom beside the rear door of Harry’s personal limousine.
“Good morning, Mr. Webb.” His unwavering smile and heels clicking together were just a bit more than I could stand. I groaned in response and collapsed on the rear seat as he firmly closed the door. The gate opened automatically for exiting traffic as I closed my eyes.
We pulled into a somewhat low-rent section of Venice Beach and went down a side street toward the ocean. As he pulled to a stop in front of a threshold beachfront hotel with a NO VACANCY sign blinking in an upper window, the surf broke in a single clap of thunder and roared. One room on the second floor was brightly lit and laughter echoed down the street. I looked behind us and saw no sign of a tail. No police. No cameras. If Nilsson and Lennon were in this place, I thought, they were well and truly submerged in the substrata of L.A. society. I knocked on the door.
Inside, someone shushed loudly and the room fell silent. Harry opened the door, red faced and sweating, fully dressed with a papier-mâché grin plastered on his face.
“Jimmy!” he exclaimed, as though in complete surprise.
It was a kitchenette apartment, on the trashy side. Behind him I saw a beautiful Asian girl sitting naked on a Formica kitchen table. Her legs were spread wide and elevated on two supporting chair backs to put her in a position not unlike the one a woman assumes on her visits to the obstetrician. She was not May Pang. As I stepped through the door I saw Lennon crouched between her legs on his haunches, fully clothed. He was rolling a hundred-dollar bill into a thin tube and fitting it with studied precision into the young lady’s vagina. She was delighted with this procedure, laughing while exhorting him, “More! Please! More!” Lennon glanced up at me coolly as I stood in the doorway, and resumed the rolling process, scarcely pausing to nod. In front of him on the table was a dwindling stack of hundreds.
“We’re going for the Guinness Book of World Records!” Harry enthused and went over to encourage John and have a look at his handiwork. I woodenly reached inside my motorcycle jacket and took out the contraband and the cash.
“Uh, here’s your stuff, Harry,” I said, my voice weak from amazement.
“Come over and have a look!” he invited, taking the hundreds and the cocaine offhandedly, as though the boys were building a model airplane.
“I gotta run. You guys go ahead with, uh, whatever … good luck with that.” I turned on my heel and walked out into the fresh cold air of the beach.
‘Thanks, Jim,” Harry called after me while closing the door.
A few days went by. Somehow a merry, merry, non-birthday party coalesced around me. It was an all-male ritual featuring Harry, Garth, Bruce Grakal, and Hilary Jarrard, Ringo’s handler. Ringo himself was noticeably absent. The party didn’t start rolling till about ten at night and immediately became a true blowout featuring cocaine, amyl nitrates—which I really couldn’t stand—and some other chemicals, it would turn out, that had not been vetted for content.
I remember with distinct clarity sitting on the big organ bench with my back to the keyboard. High on cocaine and tequila and overtaken by a depression that was like being in freefall. I wanted only to be with Rosemarie under that starry desert sky, bundled up and driving my Cobra to a new life somewhere, anywhere beyond all this crazy shit and noise that continued to escalate like the accordion catastrophes in a Buster Keaton one-reeler.
Harry came over and sat down, reading my mood instantly.
“Look, I’ve got some product here. It’s supposed to be Merc, wanna try it?”
He took a bottle out of his pocket and laid a pile on the back of his hand, hoovering it in one go. He dumped another and held it out to me. I hesitated for just a second. It didn’t look exactly as expected, but what the hell, I took it all in one blast.
We sat there for an hour or a second, I lost all track of time.
I recall Harry on all fours, crawling around on the living room floor, saying, “Zardoz, Zardoz,” over and over. I knew exactly what Zardoz was. It was a cult film starring Sean Connery about a bleak dystopian future where old age is dispensed as a punishment. In the film, a giant stone human head flew around from place to place distributing free arms and ammunition to the barbarians.
I started feeling sick to my stomach. The interior of the house was claustrophobic and now it seemed inhabited by hundreds of people, even though I knew that was impossible. I said nothing about my sudden illn
ess but left the organ bench and walked out the back door of the house where I knew I would feel better. Just get some oxygen, that’s all, and things would come back into focus. My stomach would stop doing one-and-a-half gainers into a yawning empty abyss. I walked down the driveway alone, keying on the runway lights that I had bought from an airport equipment company. One on each side, staggered down the serpentine length of the road. I was counting them. One, two, I remember counting three, oblivion. Oblivion. Oblivion.
There were moments when it seemed I almost broke through the surface tension of consciousness. People were in a panic. Harry was insensible, lying in a pile on the living room floor. They wanted to call an ambulance.
No, they weren’t going to call for an ambulance after all because it would be in all the papers. No way they were going to call an ambulance and have the police in this. I was vaguely aware that they had taken Harry away and then I was back under fighting for breath. It felt like some creature had me by the heels and was dragging me down through realms of diminishing perception and illumination to dark regions. Places darker than the familiar nights on planet Earth. A new darkness, below all this.
There were creatures with blue faces, deformed and sinister. “We have you where we want you,” they said to me. They were so happy they’d taken me down. I was not a religious guy. I had overdosed on the dogma of the Southern Baptist Church; a jaded but secret agnostic by the age of twelve. However, these ghouls were a real threat to my soul and my mental state. I invoked God and they howled in disappointment.
I’ve got to get away, I thought. If I can tread water, the world will come back. Instead I sank lower. My thoughts slowed. I passed through the realm of demons and was on a bleak, dark plain under a starless sky.
There were two of me. One suffered the most outrageous fear and insult while the other watched, calm and unsympathetic. I knew somehow that this was the final theater. It was as though all my senses save the olfactory faded and switched off one by one. Now I was robbed of even my hallucinations and there was only smell. The air I struggled to inhale was bereft of any bouquet. It was the smell of artificiality, of plastic and synthetic rubber and other noxious, nameless compounds; the concentrated exhaust of chemical factories. It would be my last sensation, this God-awful stench that eclipsed the organic putrefaction of even a decaying corpse.