Memory is a curious thing.
Even today, all these years later, I can vividly recall John’s voice on the phone—his lilting Liverpool accent, the silly dialects he would sometimes put on when he was feeling happy, his clenched tone when he was not—as if I’d hung up with him only minutes ago. If I close my eyes, pinch the bridge of my nose, and concentrate a bit harder, I can reconstruct complete conversations we had decades in the past, the memories rushing over me as if I’d just bitten into a Proustian pot brownie.
And yet, for some reason, try as I might, I cannot recall exactly how I got from Laurel Canyon to Ojai to join John and Yoko on their road trip to San Francisco. I didn’t drive my newly purchased, mechanically impaired Jaguar: I wouldn’t have parked and left it unattended while we all piled into the Dragon Wagon for what would turn out to be a weeks-long trip. I don’t recall if I took a train or bus to Ojai. Did I rent a car? My memory of that moment is about as precise as a pocket watch drooping over a tree branch.
No matter. What I do distinctly remember, with crystal clarity, is sitting up front in the station wagon next to Peter, with John and Yoko sprawled in the back, barreling up the PCH towards the Golden City as “The Loco-Motion” blared at top volume from John’s eccentric mobile stereo system.
“I know you’re gonna like it if you give it a chance now…,” Little Eva crooned through the car’s speaker system. “My little baby sister can do it with ease.”
Remember, this was 1972. The cassette deck had been introduced as an automobile accessory three years earlier. The 8-track had been available in cars since 1965. But for some reason, the Dragon Wagon had been tricked out with a turntable that played only 45s. It was mounted under the dash, to the right of the driver’s seat, and it was a less-than-dependable piece of machinery. If the Dragon Wagon hit even a small road bump, the needle on the weighted arm would skip on the vinyl.
Still, John loved the thing. He’d sit in the back with a stack of singles—“Long Tall Sally” (“She’s built for speed, she got / Everything that Uncle John need”); “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” (“We ain’t fakin’ / Whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on”); “Don’t Be Cruel” (“If you can’t come around / At least please telephone”)—and pass them up to Peter, who’d slip them on the turntable like a human jukebox.
The loud music made conversation during the car ride challenging. I’d have to twist around to face John in the back seat and holler my questions or comments over whatever tune was playing. Incredibly, Yoko seemed to sleep through most of it, her head resting against the window.
“Always loved this one!” I yelled when Rosie and the Originals started singing their 1960 hit “Angel Baby.”
John nodded in agreement.
Rosie chimed in on the speakers: “It’s just like heaven being here with you.”
“I think Rosie Hamlin wrote and recorded it when she was just fourteen,” I went on.
“Yeah, she made it in a garage somewhere near L.A. on a two-track and couldn’t get anyone to listen to it,” he shouted back. “And some fuckin’ hustlers stole it from her and kept the cash.”
“It happened a lot in those days,” I said.
John looked me straight in the eyes. “You don’t have to tell me, Angel Baby,” he said. “It happened to us.” He was referring, I realized, to the Beatles’ fraught publishing arrangement with Northern Songs, the music publishing company that for a time lorded over the Beatles catalogue.
“You’re like an angel, too good to be true,” Rosie sang on.
Later, while Steppenwolf boomed “Born to Be Wild” on the turntable, I tried my luck talking with Peter. He wasn’t exactly the chatty type—interpersonal skills were not his strong suit—but at least I didn’t have to shout as loudly since he was sitting at the wheel right next to me.
“Did they play music most of the time while you were driving across the country?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he replied, munching on some trail mix he kept in a baggie next to him. “Sometimes they spoke with each other or just slept.”
“It’s amazing Yoko is able to sleep now,” I said as Goldy McJohn’s soaring keyboard riffs filled the station wagon.
“Oh, she’s not sleeping,” he said with a smile. “She’s just got her eyes closed.”
About three hours into the drive, as we approached Big Sur, John told Peter to look for a spot near the beach where we could stop.
“I need to stretch me legs,” he pronounced.
A few minutes later, we pulled into a nearly vacant lot overlooking some dunes. Except for a few surfers bobbing in the waves, the strand was completely empty. So the four of us climbed out of the car and walked across the sand to the shoreline. Yoko was wrapped in a black silk shawl with scarves fluttering behind her in the breeze; she looked like a Bedouin in the Sahara. John wasn’t merely stretching his legs; he was twirling and pirouetting in the sand, performing a barefoot modern dance number to a tune he alone could hear. Peter, meanwhile, was standing with his back to the wind, his fingers fiddling with something that turned out to be an enormous joint.
Yoko never smoked pot—she hated the smell. The drugs she preferred, when she was doing drugs, were usually of the odorless variety, like cocaine, pills, or heroin. John, on the other hand, enjoyed pot very much, often multiple times a day. After Peter lit the doobie—not an easy task on a windy beach—he passed it to John, who took a long, impressive drag, then handed it to me. I examined Peter’s handiwork, a little jealous of his prodigious joint-rolling abilities, took a tentative toke, and nearly coughed my lungs out. Peter’s weed was a much more potent strain of cannabis than the borderline oregano I smoked back home in Laurel Canyon. Also, I hadn’t eaten in what felt like days—John and Yoko, still withdrawing from methadone, showed no interest in stopping at any of the restaurants or diners we had passed along the way—and the smoke went straight to my head.
So, yes, you could say I got high with a little help from my friends.
I didn’t suddenly hear imaginary sitar music or hallucinate dragons in the sky; as powerful as it was, it was pot, not acid. But it did instill in me a heightened awareness of my surroundings—the briny taste of the sea air, the rhythmic beat of the ceaseless waves—and reframed my consciousness about the universe and my infinitesimally tiny place in it. That helped put things in perspective.
I was out of a job. I had no idea when or where my next one would come from. My bank account would soon be depleted. And yet, twirling and laughing with John on this empty beach in Big Sur as Yoko stood by smiling, I felt an overwhelming sense of contentment and belonging. Although I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, looking back now, fifty years later, it may well have been one of the happiest moments of my life.
After thirty or forty minutes of frolicking, John signaled that it was time to resume our journey, so we all filed across the beach and piled back into the car. John kissed Yoko on the forehead and wrapped a light blanket around her as she leaned against him in the back seat. After Peter swung the Dragon back onto PCH, John handed him another 45, and we all listened in stoned silence to Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
“We skipped the light fandango,” Gary Brooker droned soulfully from the speakers, singing words that have confounded generations of rock ’n’ roll fans. “Turned cartwheels ’cross the floor.”
When it was over, I turned towards the back and asked John if he knew what the song meant.
“What do you mean, what the song meant?” he replied.
“I mean what the lyrics are about.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not the way I listen to music. It’s like ‘Tutti Frutti’: What do those lyrics mean? It’s about the rhythm, the chord changes, and the backbeat. That’s what makes me feel a song.”
“I get that,” I said. “But Some Time in New York City is certainly about more than just the backbeat. It’s also about what you are thinking and feeling.”
John seemed a little annoyed at this line of questioning. He was not a fan of dissecting his own work.
“That’s because of Yoko,” he said. “She’s the one who’s always encouraging me to shout about me fuckin’ feelings.”
Yoko chimed in: “Elliot, can’t you see that John has never had the opportunity to speak what he was feeling? His teachers didn’t understand him. His auntie burnt his poetry. Other people manipulated his life. So now, for the first time, he’s free to express himself and his true feelings.”
That’s when John expressed a true feeling that I myself had been struggling with for the whole ride. “I could do with a spot to eat,” he said.
I silently thanked the heavens—I was starving—and mentioned that we were only about thirty minutes from Monterey’s Fisherman’s Wharf, where I knew there were a slew of restaurants. The second I suggested it, though, I realized it was a terrible idea: they were John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They couldn’t pop up on a crowded pier without any security. Things could quickly get dangerous. But John waved away my concerns.
“Don’t you worry, Ellie,” he said with a grin. “Let’s get to this pier.”
“Ellie” was the first nickname John gave me, but it was far from the last. As I was about to learn, he was always creating different characters, both for me and for himself. And they could come from anywhere. Several years later, John was preparing some food and he brought out this beautiful, large wok and started to cook vegetables. And I just matter-of-factly said, “That’s a great wok.” And that became a nickname and another character for him: “The Great Wok.”
As Peter headed north towards Monterey, John and Yoko started behaving strangely. They began whispering to each other in the back seat. After a while their whispering grew more intense, then turned into a mantra or something like a Hare Krishna chant. I couldn’t quite make out the words they were intoning—it sounded a little like “Free to workin’,” maybe, or “Friday lurkin’.” I glanced over to Peter. He seemed unfazed, so I had to assume this was not unusual John and Yoko behavior. I shrugged and decided to let it go.
When we got to the wharf, my heart sank: there must have been five hundred tourists packed onto the pier. There was no way John and Yoko could navigate such a huge throng without getting mobbed. Before I could raise any objections, though, the two of them were already out the doors and heading from the parking lot straight into the crowd. I dashed after them while Peter, who remained weirdly unconcerned, stayed behind in the Wagon, nibbling on his trail mix while keeping an eye on our belongings.
I was close to panicking as I elbowed through the tourists and tried to catch up to John and Yoko. I could see them just ahead, casually weaving through the crowd as they strolled past the scores of busy gift shops and ice-cream parlors and whale-watching businesses that filled the wharf’s promenade. I kept expecting the worst: a crushing upheaval once people recognized who was among them. But remarkably, miraculously, that didn’t happen.
The most recognizable couple on the planet had ambled smack into the middle of a horde of hundreds, and not a single soul seemed to know who they were. I couldn’t understand it. How was this possible?
When I caught up with them, I quickly steered us towards a lobster restaurant at the end of the wharf. I’d eaten there before on a previous trip to Monterey and recalled it being dimly lit. We were lucky and found a relatively secluded table towards the back of the dining room. Once we settled into our seats, I shot them both an inquisitive stare.
“How?” was all I said.
John smiled, then explained what I had just witnessed.
It seemed that John and Yoko had developed a bizarre but apparently remarkably effective method of crowd control. It involved some sort of esoteric mind game in which they each mentally disguised themselves with alternative identities: John became the Reverend Fred Gherkin and Yoko became his wife, Ada. That’s what they’d been chanting in the back of the Wagon a few moments earlier: “Fred and Ada Gherkin.” Somehow, as improbable as it sounds, John and Yoko took on these imaginary roles so completely and authentically that they were able to project them to the outside world. Like a sort of mass-hypnosis invisibility cloak, it rendered them all but undetectable.
“Works every time!” John said as he unfurled a napkin on his lap. Yoko nodded in agreement.
Indeed, it did work. Or at least it did until it didn’t.
When the waiter came over to take our orders, he, too, seemed bewitched by the Fred and Ada Gherkin enchantment. Then John ordered a piece of fish. You could see the veils fall from our server’s eyes the moment he heard John’s voice.
“This is such an honor, Mr. Lennon,” he gushed nervously. “I’ve loved you since I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.” He fumbled with his pen and asked John to sign a napkin. As John jotted down his autograph, you could sense a shift in the air. Suddenly, with the Gherkin magic collapsing, all eyes were on our table. We could hear murmurs of John’s and Yoko’s names filling the room and the scraping of chairs as people got up from their tables to approach ours.
More napkins and pens were thrust in front of John, who did his best to accommodate his intrusive fans. But I could tell both he and Yoko were growing deeply uncomfortable. I was feeling nervous, too. I told the waiter to cancel our order and nodded to John and Yoko that we should make a hasty retreat before things got even more out of control.
Outside the restaurant, it was just as bad: suddenly everyone on the wharf seemed acutely aware of John and Yoko’s presence. Most people were polite; they simply wanted to express their gratitude for John’s music, to reach out and touch their idol’s arm. Still, it was suffocating, and I did my best to gently push John and Yoko through the crowd, desperate to reach the safety of the station wagon waiting for us in the parking lot.
A few minutes later, after we had made our escape and Peter was once again steering us towards San Francisco, I turned to John and Yoko and asked him what went wrong. Why had the Gherkin disguise failed them?
“It’s me voice,” he said, sounding dejected. “That’s what broke the spell. People always knew me voice before they knew what I looked like.”
For the next couple of hours, we drove in silence. Yoko napped—or seemed to—with her head resting on John’s shoulder. John stared out the window, mesmerized by the sun setting on the ocean’s horizon. I listened to my stomach growl. By the time we arrived at the Miyako, a Japanese-themed hotel where John and Yoko sometimes stayed when visiting San Francisco, it was around nine in the evening. We were all hungry, tired, and ready to call it a night.
But when we tried to check in, the hotel clerk couldn’t find our reservations.
John and Yoko’s accommodations were arranged by a travel agent in New York, who always used pseudonyms for their bookings. It was a standard arrangement for celebrities, a precaution to protect their privacy. Except this time John and Yoko couldn’t remember what pseudonym they had picked.
Normally, Peter would check them in, but he was outside in the car, keeping an eye on all our luggage. John and Yoko were standing quietly in a corner of the hotel lobby, staring very closely at a painting on the wall. This was another of their crowd control mind games: they believed they could avoid attention if they simply turned their backs and pretended to study an object in the room. It kind of worked, but it left me to sort out matters with the keeper of the keys, acting as John and Yoko’s unofficial assistant, the first but hardly last time I’d assume that role.
“Perhaps it’s under our driver’s name?” I suggested to the man behind the desk. “Do you have anything under ‘Bendrey, Peter’?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” the clerk said after flipping through a stack of reservation cards.
“What about ‘Mintz, Elliot’?”
“No, sir, not under that name, either.”
I thought for a moment.
“How about the ‘Reverend Fred Gherkin’?”
He shuffled through the cards and yanked one out with a flourish.
“Yes! I’ve got four rooms reserved for the Reverend,” he said, pulling some paperwork for me to sign. “Why didn’t you ask for that name in the first place?”
The Miyako was an unusual little hotel located at the base of Pacific Heights, in San Francisco’s Japantown. The main appeal to John and Yoko was that it was a low-key, out-of-the-way destination that nobody paid much attention to. They could cross its lobby with much less of a chance of being recognized than if they stayed at, say, the Fairmont, where the press would catch on to their presence before their luggage had even made it up the elevator.
But the Miyako was also a hotel that complemented John and Yoko’s lifestyle in other ways. Half the rooms were decorated in traditional Japanese style, with tatami mats and futon mattresses and shoji screens. The rooms in the other half were adorned with a more Western touch—box spring beds and overstuffed sofas—although even in these there were still plenty of Asian influences, including a room service menu that featured authentic Japanese cuisine. Best of all, at least from my hungry point of view, the Miyako’s kitchen stayed open late. First thing I did after escorting “Fred and Ada” to their rooms was order up a sushi feast, which the three of us shared in their suite. Peter, as usual, had disappeared to wherever he disappeared to.
“Listen, Ellie,” John said as he and Yoko picked at their food, “there’s something we need to tell ya. There’s a reason Mother and me came to San Francisco. We’ve got something to do here. You probably won’t be seeing us all that much.”
I nodded as I shoveled sashimi into my mouth. “Okay,” I mumbled between bites. “Is it something I can help you with?”
“No, Elliot,” Yoko said. “This is not something you can help us with.”
There was an awkward pause while John and Yoko exchanged glances. Then they proceeded to share with me their true motive for driving up to San Francisco: they wanted to have a baby.
John, of course, already had a child, Julian, with his ex-wife, Cynthia. Before his death, John would forge a closer relationship with his firstborn, but at this time, in 1972, he was still deeply estranged from his then nine-year-old son. John’s divorce from Cynthia and his very public love affair with Yoko had all but shattered their father-son bond.
Yoko also had a child, Kyoko, with her ex-husband Anthony Cox. Since their divorce, Cox had become a devout born-again Christian who believed that Yoko and her new husband’s “radical” lifestyle was a threat to Kyoko’s well-being. So he abducted the child when she was just seven years old and spent the next several decades hiding out with her in “safe houses” run by fringe religious sects. Eventually, in 1998, when Yoko was sixty-five and Kyoko thirty-one, mother and daughter would finally be reunited. But before then Yoko and John spent many fruitless years and thousands of wasted dollars trying to track her down. Their current lack of relationships with both children were a source of great sadness for them and one I’d learn much more about over the years.
At the current moment, as they explained to me in their suite at the Miyako, John and Yoko desperately wanted a child together but had so far been unable to carry one to term. Indeed, Yoko had suffered multiple miscarriages since John and she had started trying. That was what had brought them to San Francisco: they had heard of a Chinese herbalist, Yuan Bain Hong, who supposedly performed fertility miracles with his patients. Yoko and John would be undergoing treatments with Hong for however long it took, and it would likely take some time.
When they finished unpacking all this, I put down my chopsticks and gave them a long, appreciative gaze. As close as we’d become over the last eight or nine months, this felt to me like a new level of friendship. I was touched that they had trusted me enough to share such an intimate and painful part of their lives.
“I completely understand,” I said. “I hope this expert can help you.”
As predicted, I didn’t see a whole lot of John and Yoko during the following weeks in San Francisco. Or, for that matter, Peter, who was always driving the Lennons or off running some sort of errand for them. At one point John and Yoko moved into Hong’s house in nearby San Mateo, spending several days under his care. Then they decamped for suburban Mill Valley, where they rented a strange circular house with no right angles that Peter had arranged through a friend.
“It’s like living in a windmill,” John said. “And I’ve always wanted to live in a windmill.”
I stayed on at the Miyako, having grown fond of the place, particularly its spa, where I’d discovered the delights of Japanese massage. John and Yoko were generous, covering my hotel room, the massages, and all my expenses during the trip, all paid for with Yoko’s credit card; John was terrible with money. And at the time, I was between jobs for reasons they knew very well, so I accepted gratefully and started to explore the city beyond Japantown. And there was so much to see: back in the early ’70s, San Francisco was still the counterculture’s unofficial capital. Strolling through Haight-Ashbury, I saw hippies playing lutes and tambourines as gaggles of colorfully adorned girls—literally wearing flowers in their hair, just like in the Scott McKenzie song—danced in the streets.
John and Yoko believed Hong helped them with their fertility issues—they told me as much. And over the next few weeks, whenever John and Yoko resurfaced from the doctor’s treatments, they appeared in better health, stronger and more energetic—particularly John. Either Hong’s potions were doing wonders, or else John and Yoko were finally putting the methadone withdrawal behind them. Whatever it was, it was great to see.
One afternoon at the Miyako, John called while I was in my room.
“What are ya doing?” he asked.
“I’m reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand,” I told him.
“Why would you do that? Bloody bourgeois garbage for people with big heads and small balls.”
“I found a copy in the lobby last night. I couldn’t sleep, so I just picked it up for some bedtime reading. No reason for concern.”
“Mother has an appointment. Why don’t we go out. There’s that famous paperback writer’s bookstore. Let’s pay that a little visit.”
John was referring to City Lights, the celebrated independent bookshop in San Francisco that was famous for being the literary mecca of the bohemian scene. It certainly lived up to its reputation. As we walked in the door, I noticed the scene was unquestionably beatnik, filled with goatees, black turtlenecks, and even a few berets. John was immediately recognized, but this particular crowd was far too cool to react, and I was grateful that most of the patrons were going to leave John alone.
Most but not all.
“Pardon me for intruding, but aren’t you and your wife friends with Allen Ginsberg?” a tweedy fellow in his sixties asked John as they both poked around the same stack of anthologies by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Apparently, to this gentleman, the most notable thing about John Lennon was that he had once hung out with the poet who wrote “Howl” and who sometimes played the pump organ while reciting his work.
“Yeah, Yoko and Allen go back to the sixties,” John politely responded.
“What’s he like in person?” the man asked.
“Same guy as you read about in his books. Only without the harmonium.”
We lingered at the store for about thirty minutes, John filling a small basket with his selections, until we found ourselves at the cash register.
“I don’t have any money,” he told me. “You’ll have to pay. You’ll get it back in good karma.” John seldom carried cash and seemed almost oblivious to money, but after all of their generosity I could hardly complain about the cost of a few books.
During the cab ride to the hotel, John vented about the bookstore. He was clearly in one of his moods. “Did you hear that guy ask about Ginsberg?” he fumed. “Bloody hell. Me books are as good as anything in that store. You ever read any of me books?”
“Of course,” I replied. We’d talked about both of them—In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works—during several of our phone calls.
“Did ya notice none of me books were on the bloody shelves?”
“It’s possible they were sold out,” I suggested.
“Don’t jerk me around with your radio voice diplomacy. They weren’t there because all those old farts still see me as a fuckin’ mop top. That’s the reason I didn’t get any attention as a poet—because I was a bloody Beatle. But an artist is an artist, no matter what the medium.”
At a red light, the cabdriver turned around. “I thought that might have been you when I picked you up,” he said to John. “My wife’s a big fan. Do you think you could sign this”—he held out a small piece of paper—“to Sylvia?”
“Tell your wife you made a mistake,” John said, ignoring the paper.
Luckily, we were only a block from the Miyako. I gave the taxi driver a tip that was bigger than the fare.
In the lobby, John handed me his bag of books. “These are for you,” he said. “I thought you needed something to take your mind off Ayn Rand.” Then he disappeared for another couple of days, resuming the therapies with Hong.
For sure, San Francisco was a delightful diversion after getting fired from my radio job; however, after two weeks at the Miyako, I started thinking about heading home to Laurel Canyon. I had to find a new gig in L.A., and I needed to retrieve Shane from a neighbor, who’d agreed to take care of him for what I originally thought would just be a five-day trip. But before I left town, there was one more thing I wanted to do.
Truth be told, I had an ulterior motive of my own for coming to San Francisco that had nothing to do with visiting bookstores or girl-watching in Haight-Ashbury or even sharing face time with John and Yoko. It was something that had been occupying my mind from the moment John invited me to join the circus and come with them on their road trip.
Her name was Louise.
We’d met years earlier, bumping into each other in line at Canter’s Deli in West Hollywood, which may not sound like a terribly romantic spot for a “meet-cute” encounter, but it had a certain L.A. charm. I was maybe twenty-one, finishing up at City College and starting out in radio. She was seventeen or eighteen, with long blond hair, doe eyes, and a smile so captivating it almost made me forgot what sort of sandwich I wanted to order.
Our affair was intense, as first loves tend to be, but also not very stable, which is also typical of puppy love. I was too wrapped up in forging a career for myself and she was too young to have any patience for a neglectful boyfriend, so we went our separate ways, or at least tried to. Somehow, though, we couldn’t make the breakup stick. We kept circling back to each other, then breaking up again, boomeranging back and forth in an on-again, off-again arrangement that drove us both a little crazy. Eventually, we settled into what would ultimately become a decades-long platonic friendship, but it would take years for the romantic embers to completely fizzle out, if they ever fully did.
As it happened, Louise now lived in Mill Valley. So, as I’d been planning the whole trip, I called and invited her out to dinner…with my friends.
It was, in my mind, a simple experiment. I wanted to see if I could somehow find an intersection in the Venn diagram that was becoming my life. In one circle, there was my secret friendship with John and Yoko. In the other, everything else: my job, my neighbors and friends, my romantic partners, my increasingly fleeting downtime. Louise, I decided, would test whether there was a space in which the two separate universes could ever overlap.
It was, obviously, a gross violation of the rules that Yoko had only weeks earlier laid down in that bathroom in Ojai: “Don’t even tell people you know us. Just keep us your secret.” But I’d dropped Louise’s name to John and Yoko more than once during our phone calls. So, when I casually suggested to them that I bring her to dinner, they didn’t immediately shut down the idea. As much as they were suspicious of outsiders, I suppose a small part of them may have been somewhat curious about the only girl in my life I had ever bothered to mention to them.
We met at Soupçon, a tiny storefront-style café on Caledonia Street in Sausalito that Louise recommended. It wasn’t fancy; there were only about ten tables and I think the most expensive dish on the menu was a crab salad for $6. Louise lived humbly and frugally; she wasn’t one for fancy restaurants. But she wasn’t the slightest bit starstruck. She spoke to John and Yoko as if they were just regular folk from out of town. John and Yoko, for their part, were friendly and courteous, if not exactly warm, but also kind of peculiar.
“If you ever marry this fellow, make certain he cleans the dishes and takes the trash to the bin” was the first thing John said to Louise. He was joking, of course, but it struck me as an inelegant way to say hello.
“What do you usually eat here?” Yoko asked Louise while perusing the menu.
“I usually have the lentil soup,” she replied.
“I will have that,” Yoko declared, slapping closed the menu.
“Same for me,” John said.
I looked around the table, feeling a bit like the chaperone of a reluctant blind date. “That’s it?” I asked. “That’s all you’re ordering?”
Nobody said anything, so I ordered the soup, too. And a glass of Chardonnay.
Over the next forty minutes, the conversation was pleasant and polite but not particularly memorable. Mostly we talked about the food. The liveliest moment was during dessert; John couldn’t decide what he wanted, so he ended up ordering everything from the dessert tray. I could tell Louise was overwhelmed.
By the end of the evening, though, I knew my little experiment had failed. John and Yoko never said as much out loud, but I could feel from their body language and the uneasiness of the small talk—as well as the meaningfully cool glances Yoko threw at me towards the end of the dinner—that they weren’t at all thrilled I had brought an interloper into our midst.
Whatever magic happened between me, Yoko, and John when we got together, it couldn’t be re-created as a party of four.