One sweltering afternoon in the summer of 1977, a courier on a motorbike turned up at my house in Laurel Canyon. I wasn’t expecting a delivery, so I was a little puzzled when he handed over a large manila envelope. Inside was a first-class airline ticket to Tokyo and a note in John’s unmistakable handwriting.
“We miss you,” it read. “Come join us.”
John and Yoko, along with now nearly two-year-old Sean, had departed for Japan a few months earlier for a long sojourn in Yoko’s homeland. Her family had property outside of Tokyo, in the small village of Karuizawa, where the Lennons had taken up residence in a beautiful old hotel called the Mampei. Although our daily phone calls stopped while they were away—the red light on my bedroom ceiling remained eerily unblinking for weeks on end—I received over a hundred letters and postcards from their travels filled with John’s inimitable doodles and quirky, pun-filled wordplay. After years of almost daily telephone calls, the letters and postcards were a refreshing and fun way to feel connected to my dear friends, and I enjoyed every one.
Still, I missed them, and, as it happened, the invitation couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune moment. I’d been working in radio for more than a decade—engaging in what would amount to hundreds of hours of broadcasting—and was at that point starting to feel burnt out from the endless, stressful cycle of finding talent, booking talent, and then endeavoring to engage that talent in scintillating on-air conversation. I was ready for a change, contemplating a career switch—the brave new world of media consulting sounded potentially promising—and had just weeks earlier taken a break from my regular programming. For the first time since hopping into the Dragon Wagon for that road trip to San Francisco, I had a stretch of empty days on my calendar. Why not spend some of them in Japan?
So, about a week later, I was packing my bags and preparing for my first-ever trans-Pacific flight the following morning. To keep myself company as I folded my favorite Hawaiian shirts into my suitcase, I switched on the TV. That’s when I heard something over the airwaves that suddenly made me stop packing.
Elvis Presley had died.
Obviously, it wasn’t as devastating to me as Sal’s death the year before. I had never even met Elvis. Still, he’d been a huge part of my cultural evolution, far more important to me than even the Beatles. To me and to countless other teenagers of my generation, Presley represented freedom and rebellion. We’d never seen anyone who looked like him, sang like him, and especially moved like him. He was the James Dean of rock music: defiant, original, and dangerous.
I knew Elvis had been a hugely influential figure to John as well. Without Presley, it’s entirely possible that John might never have picked up a guitar and the Beatles might never have existed. “Before Elvis,” John once famously said, neatly summing up Presley’s importance to rock ’n’ roll, “there was nothing.”
Phone calls across the Pacific in those days were not commonplace, but I wanted to be the one to break the news to John. I assumed he’d be upset and might need to talk about it; I wanted to be there for him, if only by phone, to reciprocate the attention he and Yoko had bestowed on me after Sal’s funeral. So I placed a call to Karuizawa.
“I was just thinking about you!” John said, sounding chipper. Clearly, word of Elvis’s death had not yet reached him.
“Look, John, I have some bad news.”
“What is it, then?” he said, his tone suddenly serious.
“It was just announced that Elvis has died.”
“What happened? How’d he die?”
“They’re saying it was a massive heart attack.”
He paused for a very long time. Then he did something I’ll never forget, something that stunned me a little. He was flippant.
“Elvis died when he went into the Army,” he said.
There was another pause, with trans-Pacific static filling the line for a good ten seconds. “The difference between the Beatles and Elvis is that Elvis died and his manager is still alive,” he finally said. “But with the Beatles the manager died and we’re still alive. But I never wanted to be a forty-year-old bloke who died singing his golden hits in a jumpsuit in Las Vegas.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t say anything.
“Send two white gardenias to his grave,” he continued, softening a bit at my silence. “With a note that says, ‘Rest in peace, John and Yoko.’ ”
“Okay.”
“See you soon, then?”
“Yes,” I said, a little shaken. “See you in Japan.”
I remember thinking in that moment that someday, years from then, a reporter might ask me what John Lennon had said when I told him Elvis had died. And I knew how much I would want to resist answering that question truthfully.
In my shock about Elvis’s death and rush to comfort John, I’d forgotten how complicated his feelings were towards Presley. Somewhere along the line, John’s teenage admiration of Elvis had curdled into disappointment—and I knew exactly when that started to happen. In the mid-1960s, at the height of Beatlemania, John and his bandmates met Elvis at his home in Bel Air, and it did not go well. John kept asking Presley why he’d made all those “terrible movies”—Viva Las Vegas had just come out—which naturally set Elvis on edge. He disliked John immediately. Later, as John became more political, speaking out against the war in Vietnam, incurring Nixon’s wrath and the subsequent threats of deportation, John grew equally contemptuous of his old idol. Presley, after all, had been a huge Nixon supporter and had even gone to the White House to receive an honorary federal narcotics agent badge.
The next morning I settled in for the eleven-hour flight to Tokyo. I’d never been to Asia before and was excited about the adventure ahead, but also a little nervous. Karuizawa was not exactly a popular tourist destination, and it was complicated to get there. John and Yoko had sent ahead extremely specific instructions for what to do when I landed: a man would meet me at the airport and take me to a railroad station, where I’d board a train and get off at the eleventh stop, then another man would meet me with further instructions. It all reminded me of the first time we had met, the wild-goose chase in Ojai. But this time I was worried, not without good reason, that I might find myself lost in a land where I didn’t speak a word of the native language.
Sure enough, after we landed, I couldn’t find the man who was supposed to meet me at the airport—at least, not at first. After wandering around my arrival gate for I have no idea how long, I eventually spotted a Japanese man in a jacket and tie who appeared to be waiting for someone, presumably me. This, thankfully, turned out to be my first Karuizawa connection. He didn’t speak English, but after some hand signaling we did indeed end up at a rail station, where he deposited me on what I prayed was the correct train.
As instructed, I got off at the eleventh stop. By this time it was about three in the morning, and the station was completely deserted except for an elderly man with a long gray beard waiting by a pair of broken-down bicycles. I smiled at him and said, “John Lennon?” He smiled back and bowed. I tried again. “Yoko Ono?” I asked. This time his face lit up; I obviously had the right man. He also didn’t speak English but somehow managed to convey that we were to bicycle to the Mampei; my bags would follow later. Apparently, in these parts, bicycles were the dominant mode of transportation.
As it turned out, it was a marathon ride, at least six or seven miles. There were several moments when I was pretty sure I was going to have a coronary. And then, of course, it started raining. But finally, after about forty minutes, I spotted some gardens in the distance. Then, as we pedaled closer, I saw the Mampei, a charming old inn opened in 1902—when Japan was first starting to cultivate Western tourism—that looked a bit like an alpine retreat transplanted from a Swiss mountainside. As we rolled up to the hotel’s stately entrance, the intoxicating scent of cherry blossoms nearly lifted me off my bike.
I turned around to give the old man a tip, but he had already vanished. Instead, I found myself standing next to a lovely young Japanese woman who silently led me through a shoji door and into the hotel, where, after a minute or two of filling out paperwork, I was escorted to the inn’s mineral baths. After the flight from L.A. and the train and bike rides, soaking in these magic waters was one of the most relaxing experiences of my life. Afterwards, I was given a kimono and led to my room, which was filled with exotic flowers and pounds of fresh fruit. There was also a note from John and Yoko.
“We’re all together now, just like family,” it read. “We’ll see you in the morning.”
My lifelong insomnia was no match for the 5,500-mile journey from Los Angeles to Karuizawa and I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the tatami mat. I don’t often dream, or at least I don’t often remember when I do, but that night I dreamt about being on a small boat—more of a raft, really—with John and Yoko. We were floating on a lake as still and calm as the Mampei’s mineral baths, and occasionally Yoko would reach down and pull a fish from the water, talk to it in Japanese, and set it free. Then John dove in for a swim and disappeared under the raft. When he didn’t resurface, I began to panic; I did not know how to swim, so I couldn’t rescue him. But Yoko gently touched my arm and said, “It’s okay, Elliot, John will be back when he’s ready.”
I had no idea what the dream meant, if anything, but when I was startled awake the next day by a knocking on my door, I was extremely relieved to see John and Yoko standing there, safe and sound, him in a beautiful antique kimono, her in a white silk robe. Indeed, the two of them had never looked healthier. Over the two months they’d been in Japan, they’d radically altered their lifestyle—particularly John, who in New York considered chocolate cake one of the basic food groups. They were eating fresh fruits and vegetables and plenty of fresh fish, were bicycling everywhere, and were leaner and fitter than I’d ever seen them. They both had shimmering long hair—something about the enchanted water here gave their locks a nearly surreal sheen—and their skin appeared almost to glow. They seemed to me like a vision, almost as if I were still dreaming.
After we embraced each other—more of a pat on the back with Yoko—they took me for a stroll along a nearby lane, where we stopped for a sushi lunch. I should note here that sushi in Karuizawa was not the same thing as sushi in Los Angeles. The fish in this town were literally plucked out of an eight-hundred-year-old stream running next to the restaurant and served so fresh, you could feel them wiggling down your throat.
Every day was a new adventure. One morning we cycled up a hill to a tea shop, maybe five or six miles away. Yoko always rode ahead, and John and I would have to struggle to catch our breath as we tried to meet her. Yoko went out of her way to try to find experiences that would be unique and special for me—it was one of her ways of inviting me in, showing her warmth. Although, some of them were a bit too much for me. Yoko took us to a restaurant that served turtle soup. It was similar to going to a restaurant where you pick your lobster from a tank, but in this case, they’d bring out the turtle for turtle soup and dangle it in front of you. A few minutes later, it would come back, the soup in the shell with the turtle’s feet in it. I didn’t opt for seconds.
“So,” I asked over a later, turtle-free lunch, “what else have you two been doing here? How do you usually spend your days when you’re not hosting me?”
They both looked at me as if I’d arrived from another planet.
“Well,” John answered, “we’re just being.”
“Just being?”
“After you slow down for a while, you’ll understand,” Yoko answered.
She was right. And it didn’t take long. After a few days, I noticed that time moved at a far more leisurely pace in Karuizawa. It might have been because there was less sensory input than in New York or Los Angeles—no honking cars, no bustling crowds. Just the soft sound of shakuhachi music wafting through the air, making the days seem to drift along like tangerine dreams on marmalade clouds. There might be yoga in the morning, or a stroll with Sean, or bike rides up the hill to an espresso café that John and Yoko had discovered. One afternoon Yoko arranged for John and me to get massages at a Shinto monastery where an order of elderly blind women used mystical tactile techniques to transfer healing energy. It was an amazing, magical place—a hundred years earlier, it had been a sanctuary for battered Japanese wives—and I left feeling as if I had truly been touched by something preternatural.
At one point we took a trip to Kyoto, about a five-hour drive from Karuizawa, to visit some of the ancient Shinto temples. Surprisingly, John was the one most enthralled by the experience, closing his eyes and clasping his hands in prayer as he bent before the shrines. Ironically, the man who had written “God,” a song proclaiming nonbelief in pretty much everything having to do with religion, got so wrapped up in Shinto ritual, even Yoko took notice. I recall at one temple there was a place where people could purchase fortunes on small pieces of paper and hang them on strings as offerings to the spirit world. John and Yoko and I all chose our notes and hung them up.
John bowed his head and closed his eyes.
Later I half-teasingly asked him, “What did you pray for?”
“It wasn’t a prayer,” he answered defensively. “It was just a wish. I wished for peace. What did you wish with yours?”
“I asked that the spirits bless us all,” I answered.
“Ah, well then, you totally missed the point, mate,” he said. “The spirit is in you.”
As blissful as our stay in Karuizawa was, John and Yoko had been there quite a while before I joined them. So, a few weeks after I arrived, when Yoko’s psychic advisors determined that the time was ripe for the Lennons to move on, they decided to decamp for Tokyo, where Yoko had business meetings and family get-togethers. We all packed our bags and headed for the railroad station in Kyoto, where we boarded the then relatively new bullet train, the fastest, most luxurious way to travel in Japan without leaving the ground. As the name implies, it wasn’t a long journey—at 180 miles per hour, the trip took only about two and a half hours—but Yoko, who’d been our nonstop translator, tour guide, and entertainment director during our weeks in Karuizawa, decided to use that time for a well-deserved nap, leaving John and me alone to entertain each other.
“Do you want to play a meaningless game?” I asked John as the train whooshed past the blurry Japanese countryside.
“If it’s meaningless, why would I want to play it?” he asked.
“Because it makes the time go away,” I answered.
“Nothing makes time go away,” he said. “But what’s your meaningless game, then?”
What I had in mind was a variation of Geography. In that game, one person names a city, country, or continent and the next person has to come up with a location that begins with the last letter of the place that’s just been named. So, if I said New York, the other person would have to think up a city that began with the letter K, like Kandahar, and then I’d have to name a city that began with the letter R, like Rio de Janeiro, and so on. Only, in the version I wanted to play with John, instead of cities, we were going to use Beatles songs.
“Beatles songs?” John asked. “That’s really what you want to do on the train?”
“Yeah. I think it could be fun.”
“I never think about Beatles songs,” he said. “I use them as me calendar. That’s how I remember when things in me life happened: I remember where I was when Paul and I wrote a song. But outside of that, I don’t give them much attention. I seldom play them. I rarely listen to them. Especially the early songs. It’s a daft game.”
“Let’s try it anyway,” I pressed on. “Part of the idea of this sort of game is that it takes you out of the intellectual process. It occupies the mind but in a nonintellectual way.”
“Well, you’re very good at taking me out of the intellectual process, because this is a really pointless game. Do you have a better one?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
And so, while zooming through Japan on the fastest train in the world, we played the Beatles song game.
John was terrible at it. I named “Come Together,” and he got stuck trying to think of a Beatles song that began with the letter R (“Revolution,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and “Run for Your Life” come to mind). I named “A Day in the Life,” and for whatever reason he was unable to think of “Eleanor Rigby” or “Eight Days a Week.” After about five minutes, I could see his frustration mounting.
“What are you trying to prove, Ellie?” he fumed. “I don’t know why you brought up this game. I’ve spent me whole life trying not to play games.”
“Is your frustration perhaps due to the fact that you can’t name a Beatles song that begins with the letter D?”
I had just named “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and John had been unable to come up with “Day Tripper,” “Dear Prudence,” or “Drive My Car.”
“Why are you trying to provoke me?” John nearly shouted.
“It’s just a game,” I said. “It’s supposed to be fun.”
“It’s a stupid game,” he sneered, then pulled his hat over his forehead, leaned back, and pretended to fall asleep.
In Tokyo, we stayed at the Okura, which at the time was the poshest hotel in the city, the Japanese equivalent of the Plaza in New York. And by “stayed” I mean we almost never left the premises, as per Yoko’s explicit instructions. She had good reasons for wanting John to remain inside.
For starters, Tokyo was—and still is—one of the most complicated, easy-to-get-lost-in cities on earth. Even lifelong residents find its byzantine web of alleys and passageways confounding. For another, unlike Karuizawa, where John may have stood out as a gaijin tourist but was seldom recognized as a former Beatle, Tokyo was not a safe place for him to be wandering the streets. Even back in 1977, the city was bursting with a cosmopolitan population of more than 27 million, a large portion of which would certainly recognize a former Beatle when they saw one. One of the reasons Yoko had chosen the Okura was that it boasted exceptional internal security. She knew John would be safe there, provided he didn’t wander beyond its protective moat.
Fortunately, the Okura was enormous, a small city of its own. And the Lennons had reserved the presidential suite, which was itself so huge, one might easily get lost in it. The living room was so big, John and Sean sometimes played soccer in it when they weren’t racing in toy pedal cars down its seemingly endless hallways. If we had stayed in Tokyo for only a few days or even a week, restricting our movements to the Okura might not have been much of a problem. John was used to being holed up in hotels. For years, he’d literally lived in them. (The Beatles had performed more than 1,400 concerts around the world during their time together.) But we ended up lingering there much longer because Yoko’s advisors were having a hard time finding safe travel dates. After a couple of weeks, John began to grow restless and moody. One night, while Yoko was out and Sean had been put to bed by the nanny, John sat in the enormous living room lazily strumming his acoustic guitar, talking to me about how bored and homesick he was.
“I just want to be in me own bed with me Scott amp and me books,” he said.
“Yeah,” I responded. “I hope the numbers will be favorable soon so we can leave.”
John’s plucking on his guitar morphed into a recognizable tune—he started playing “Jealous Guy”—when all of a sudden the elevator that led from the lobby directly to the presidential suite swooshed open. A Japanese couple, dressed for dinner, stepped out, strolled around, took in the living room’s spectacular view of the city, then sat down on one of the couches. John and I just looked at each other. Obviously, the couple had taken a forbidden turn into the wrong elevator. How this happened, we never did figure out; it was obviously a shocking breach of security. But the couple must have assumed they’d found the hotel’s penthouse cocktail lounge: it was, after all, an expansive sofa-lined space with live entertainment. They lit a couple of cigarettes and glanced around for a waitress to take their drink orders. John and I grinned at each other, and he kept playing. After a few more smokes, the couple got up and, looking annoyed and disappointed, headed back down the elevator to search for a more exciting club.
And so it came to pass that John Lennon’s final public concert would be held in a hotel room in Tokyo for a couple of Japanese strangers who obviously had no idea who he was. Fate does indeed have a wicked sense of humor.
A few evenings later, when Yoko was out again visiting with family, John decided he’d had enough of being cooped up. “I want to go outside,” he announced. “I want fresh air. We’ve been stuck in this bloody hotel for weeks.”
“Mother told us not to leave,” I reminded him. “We don’t have any security and we don’t know our way around the city.” I sensed a rebellion was brewing.
“I know what Mother said,” he went on. “I want to go out.”
We were like two brothers arguing over whether to defy a parent’s instructions and do something dangerous without adult supervision. But John was the older sibling, even if I tended to be the more cautious one, and it was impossible not to follow his lead. I wasn’t about to block the elevator door.
It was just after sunset when we left the hotel and took a cab into the heart of Tokyo, which was every bit as shambolic and confusing as Yoko had warned. We were instantly dazed by a jumble of flashing neon and knocked about by massive waves of shoulder-to-shoulder foot traffic. I’d never seen a more congested city; it was like Times Square squared. But John just bounded ahead, fearless as always, taking in the sights. He seemed particularly interested in the sake bars that dotted every block. I dreaded what was coming.
“I want sake,” he said.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I implored, thinking of Yoko’s post–Lost Weekend admonitions that at all costs I should keep John away from alcohol. She knew, as did I, that John became a very different person when he drank.
“It’s just sake!” he said as he headed into one of the lounges. “It’s like having a glass of wine.” I followed close behind as we inched our way to the crowded bar. He was about to order when he realized he had no money. He never had money. He nudged my shoulder and told me to get him a sake. I searched my pockets and fished out some crumpled Japanese bills. Against my better judgment, I ordered one sake for John and one glass of white wine for myself, which took all of fifteen seconds to appear in front of us. I had barely reached for my wineglass when John smacked his empty sake cup back down on the bar. “Order another,” he commanded.
I was in too deep now; there was no way of talking him out of it. So I ordered another sake, then another, then another. But as John downed his fourth drink, I began to notice a familiar energy pattern forming in the bar. I obviously didn’t speak Japanese, but I heard a growing hum of murmurs, then someone loudly said the word “Beatle” and then somebody else said “John” and suddenly the already jam-packed room felt even more crowded as people pushed closer to us, their drinks sloppily spilling onto their sleeves.
“John,” I said, “we better get out of here. It could get rough.”
He downed the rest of his sake and we moved towards the door. But by now he’d been recognized, and half the bar filed out with us, following us down the street. Within minutes, virtually everyone on the sidewalk had somehow been made aware that John Lennon was in their midst. Scores of pedestrians began swarming around us, thrusting pens at John, shouting in Japanese and demanding autographs.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I shouted over the din. “This isn’t safe. I’m hailing a cab.”
John just glowered at me, the alcohol already activating the Mr. Hyde side of his personality. “I want another sake,” he said through gritted teeth, ignoring the fan riot erupting around him. “I’m not asking; I’m bloody telling.”
“John, this is dangerous! There’s a lot of plate glass windows on these buildings. Somebody could get hurt. You could get hurt.”
That’s when he grabbed me by my lapels and pushed me back against a concrete wall. “If I want to have a fucking drink, you’re not standing in my way!” he shouted. “You got that?”
But, of course, there was no way for John to get another drink. Even in his drunken state, he could see the crowd was out of control, that it wasn’t going to let him simply slip into a different sake bar. His only choice was to climb into the cab that I managed to catch and return to his suite at the Okura, where Yoko was waiting, looking very much like a furious parent. I could tell from the expression on her face there would be consequences. Maybe not for John, but certainly for his supposedly more sensible younger sibling.
“I’m very, very disappointed in you,” Yoko said, scolding me in the living room after John sheepishly slunk off to the bedroom to sleep off the sake. “Many times I told you not to let John drink alcohol. Many times I told you not to let him leave the hotel. Why did you disobey me? Why did you ignore my wishes?”
“I’m very sorry, Yoko,” I said, studying my shoelaces, resisting the urge to argue that there was no way of stopping it, and that while I didn’t agree with all of John’s decisions, he was still an adult, beyond my control. “I will not make this mistake again.”
The next day, John awkwardly approached me. “How’d it go with Mother?” he asked.
“She expressed her disappointment in me,” I said, “for allowing last night to happen.”
“I figured she would blame you,” he said. “She didn’t say anything to me. Sorry, Ellie.”
It was perhaps not coincidental that soon after this escapade Yoko decided it was time to return to America. Her advisors still calculated that it was unsafe for John to fly directly from Tokyo to New York, but Yoko came up with an astrologically acceptable alternative. She would fly directly from Tokyo to New York, while John and I—along with Sean and his nanny—would fly to Hong Kong. Then the nanny and Sean would fly from Hong Kong to New York, while John and I would return via a more circuitous route, traveling to Bangkok to Dubai to Frankfurt, and finally arriving in New York nearly two days later.
John and Yoko always flew in the front of the plane. Indeed, they not only purchased first-class tickets for themselves but bought the seats adjacent to them as well, keeping them empty so that John would never find himself sitting next to a stranger having to explain why the Beatles weren’t getting back together. Once the new 747 double-decker jets were introduced, it was not uncommon for them to splurge on the entire upstairs cabin. They’d done just that on the way to Japan, so that Sean could lay out his toy train tracks and spend the flight playing on the floor.
In some ways, they were very different sorts of travelers. Yoko was the type to pack twenty-five suitcases, leaving nothing she might want behind. John, on the other hand, took enormous pride in being able carry all the essentials he’d need for a journey around the globe in a single attaché case. He adored attaché cases and owned dozens of them, many of which he’d purchased from the duty-free catalogues he’d find in airplane seat pockets. But when it came to the details of their itineraries—when and where to fly—John left those decisions entirely to his wife and her advisors, even if it meant schlepping the wrong way around the world for two days. I never heard him once complain about Yoko’s sometimes tortuous travel agenting.
There were, however, occasional hiccups. For instance, while our flights to Hong Kong and Dubai went off without a hitch, John and I did run into some trouble in Frankfurt, Germany—John’s first trip to that country since 1966, and only his second since 1962, when the Beatles played the Star-Club in Hamburg’s notorious red-light district. Somehow, the desk clerk at the airport hotel couldn’t find our reservations, and no amount of my pleading could convince him to give us some rooms. I reported the bad news to John, who’d been “hiding” in the hotel lobby by using his old disguise of staring close up at a wall.
“They have no rooms,” I said.
“They have rooms!” he said. “They always have rooms!”
“Maybe you can try?” I asked. “I mean, you are John Lennon. If anybody can get us rooms, you can.”
“I can’t do that,” he said. “I can’t say, ‘I’m a Beatle: give us rooms.’ ”
“John, it’s raining outside. We can’t walk around Frankfurt in the rain all night.”
John sighed and headed towards the front desk to reluctantly play the Beatle card. For the next few minutes, I watched as he and the clerk chatted, occasionally smiled, and at one point even laughed. And then, for some reason, John pointed at me. The clerk stared in my direction, nodding furiously. A few moments later, John came over with two keys.
“I told him you were Paul McCartney,” John said. “That seemed to work.”
It worked, all right. I was given a gorgeous suite with a feather bed and a sauna. A little later, the desk manager sent up a tray of delicious snacks and a bottle of wine. Life as Paul McCartney was clearly good.
But then, early in the morning, John was at my door, looking tired and miserable. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “This place is such a dive. They gave me a bloody closet.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “This place is great!”
John stepped into the suite, surveyed its opulence, and his jaw practically hit the floor.
“I guess the desk manager liked the fact that I wrote ‘Yesterday,’ ” I joked.
John didn’t laugh.
Some twelve hours later, we found ourselves in the upper deck of a jumbo jet making its descent into John F. Kennedy International Airport. After so much time in Japan and then so many hours in the air, it felt a little surreal to finally land back in the United States. Hustling through immigration, it occurred to me that this must have been an especially sweet moment for John. Japan had been his first overseas excursion since his immigration victory finally granting him permanent residence in the United States. For the first time in years, he didn’t have to worry about being turned away at the border. On the contrary, getting his passport stamped at JFK may well have been the high point of his whole trip. The agent at the customs booth examined his documents, smiled, then said the words John had so fervently yearned to hear for so long.
“Welcome home, Mr. Lennon.”