REAL LOVE

The good news comes on one of those falsely beautiful late-February days—sixty degrees, sunny, the icicles melting, dripping off the eaves of every building on the block. Days like this make me anxious. The weather’s just a tease, flirting with springtime before dumping a barrage of snow later in the week. I’ve been a Midwesterner for nearly thirty years, yet the blind California optimism still creeps into my thoughts on days like this, thinking maybe spring is here early, maybe this year it will just stay like this, warm and blue skied.

“It’s on!” Sam shouts into my ear. I press down my cell phone volume. Sam never talks, only shouts. Before he started our Beatles cover band, he was a high school gym teacher. He retired and decided to pursue his teenage dream of playing the drums. “Lincoln Hall wants us!” he continues.

“Really?” I don’t realize until the good news come how much I expected it to be bad news. I can’t shake the feeling.

“I’ll give you the details at rehearsal tonight,” Sam says.

I walk over to the kitchen window, yank up the blinds. Light streams in, making me squint. “Sounds great.”

“Lincoln Hall!” Sam says, adopting his Ringo accent. “We’re in the big leagues now, Johnny boy!”

“See you tonight,” I say, hanging up before he can try to talk to me about Bill. Sam doesn’t understand that there are some problems you just can’t talk through. Bottom line is, I don’t trust Bill. He tries to hide it, but I can tell he wants my role in the band. He wants to stick me with George’s guitar riffs while he croons “Dear Prudence” to a captivated, teary-eyed audience. A woman once approached after a show and gave me a fierce, weepy hug, thanking me for bringing John Lennon back to life for a couple hours. It was one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me. The only problem was that Bill was packing up equipment right next to me, and he heard it, too. Ever since then, he’s been gunning for my spot.

I take my coffee out to my narrow balcony, standing on the splintery wood in my socks, looking down at the morning joggers and dog walkers. I still don’t know anyone’s names, but I wave back to those who wave to me. It’s a quiet neighborhood, one of those renovated historic districts; my apartment is the top floor of an old house that’s been split up into single-bedroom units. When I first moved in, I thought it would be a temporary place, just somewhere to store my boxes of crap and catch my breath after the divorce. But it’s been two years, and I’m still here. It suits me, I guess.

Puddles have gathered where last night was snow. The cold dampness of the wood seeps into my socks, but I stand for a few minutes longer, watching a group of kids laughing and jostling each other on the way to the bus stop, knit caps pushed back off foreheads, jackets unzipped and flapping. Unbidden I think of Sarah as a little girl, that bright-pink headband she loved to wear, the way she’d run to give me a hug when I got home from work—her genuine excitement to see me, as if I’d been gone weeks instead of hours. Faye used to be excited to see me, too. Or maybe that’s too strong of a word, excited. But she was happy. Pleased. Pleased that I was home, pleased to sit down beside me on the couch after the dinner had been eaten and the dishwasher had been loaded, pleased to watch a couple hours of mindless TV side by side while the dishwasher hummed and the dog snored and Sarah talked on the phone with friends up in her room. There was a time Faye didn’t hate to be in the same room.

I’m starting to feel chilled in only my sweatshirt, so I head back inside, unpeeling my socks and dropping them on the carpet just inside the doorway. I’ll leave them there for days because Faye isn’t here to tell me not to. Two years post-divorce, it’s still the small pleasures I cling to the most.

•••••••

I first auditioned for the role of Paul. Truth is, Paul’s always been my favorite Beatle; the songs he wrote were the ones I grew up fumbling over on the guitar—but I didn’t get the role. They wanted someone who could play left handed. Sam is all about authenticity.

So, leftie Rob got to be Paul, me John, and Bill George. Originally, Sam went with a different guy for George, but that guy wasn’t willing to commit to Sam’s required three-nights-a-week practice regimen. “If you’re not serious about this, get out now!” Sam had barked at us that first rehearsal, held in his basement that he’d converted to a music room. “This band is only for real musicians and real Beatles enthusiasts. In this band, we will not only play the Beatles, we will become the Beatles.”

Sam is our Ringo, but he lacks much of the real Ringo’s charm or looks. Sam’s hair sprouts out in gray tufts, a crown around his perpetually sunburned bald spot, and his round eyes bulge from his face like an angry cartoon character. Still, he gets things done. People listen to him. We listen to him.

“John!” he says, stopping us in the middle of “Come Together.” He’s referring to me; he insists we call each other by our Beatle names during rehearsals and performances. “You were really flat there. That’s the most important part of the song. It’s all building up to that chorus. You’ve really got to nail it, mate.”

Sam brings out the awkward middle-school student still buried inside me—eager to please, easy to shame. I nod, warmth flooding my face, blood pumping in my temples. Bill smirks at me, eyes gleaming with hope. I grit my teeth and fiddle with my guitar, pretending to retune the strings. I’m not giving up my role as John. I’ve been playing him for nearly three years now. When I’m performing, the border between me and John Lennon fades away. I put on my long brown wig, all-white suit, and iconic round glasses, and I don’t just look like John Lennon—I am John Lennon. For an hour or two, I bring him back to life.

•••••••

John Lennon died on a Monday. I was sleeping on the ancient, moldy-cushioned couch in the basement of my college dorm in Chicago. My roommate was the type of small-town high school football captain who felt swallowed up by big-city life, so insisted on being the alpha dog of the dorm. I was the type of California loner who’d spent afternoons in high school wandering alongside the ocean, tossing driftwood into the waves. I avoided confrontation, especially the physical kind. My roommate would barge into our shoebox of a dorm room with his frat guy posse, smelling of cheap cologne and cheaper whiskey, and he wouldn’t even have to kick me out. I’d leave of my own volition. There was a piano in the basement I liked to play. It was missing three keys and severely out of tune, but it was comforting. Nobody else went down to the basement except to do laundry, so I was pretty much left alone. The couch was lumpy, its insides teeming with coiled springs that made it impossible to get comfortable no matter how you arranged and rearranged your limbs, but it was something, and it was more or less mine.

That night, for the first time in weeks, I went to bed happy. I’d finally met a girl who seemed to like me, too. We’d gone for coffee, and she hadn’t seemed in a hurry to leave, and she hadn’t seemed embarrassed to be with me even when I sloshed coffee onto my shirt. I fell asleep with her name looping through my mind—Faye, Faye, Faye.

The next day, I woke with a stiff back that for once didn’t bother me, and I may have even been whistling as I walked across campus to my morning class. It was there I found out about John Lennon. I thought someone was making a bad joke, but there was the newspaper being passed around—proof. The stark black ink of the headline left no room for hope. I beelined out of class and stumbled back to my dorm where I parked myself on the piano bench and pounded out every Beatles song I could think of, especially “Julia.” I ended up playing that one over and over, like a prayer. Then I called Faye. As soon as I heard her voice, I started crying.

“You’re lucky I went out with you again after that,” she’d say to me years later, her tone teasing but with a serious edge. “You seemed unstable, crying to a girl you’d just met.”

Even at the time, she hadn’t understood why I was so devastated over John’s death. “Because it’s the end of something big” was the closest I could get to explaining it. “He was John Lennon. He was magic.” How could I put into words what his music meant to me?

“It’s sad,” Faye said. “But you need to get ahold of yourself. He was a great musician, but he wasn’t your friend. You didn’t know him.”

I probably should have known then that things between us would fall apart eventually.

•••••••

In the weeks leading up to our Lincoln Hall performance, the intensity of rehearsals steadily escalates. It’s a routine I’ve become familiar with from our dozens of performances for VFW gatherings and neighborhood block parties and summer festivals. Sam’s excitement at booking a show quickly disintegrates into a manic striving for perfection in every note we play, every word we sing. I try not to look at Bill, try not to be alone in the same room with him. My nerves are on edge, and I don’t need Bill smirking at me, making me feel like my role as John is in jeopardy.

A week before the big show, Sam decides in a caffeine-fueled frenzy to add a new song to our set list: “Real Love,” a song John wrote post-Beatles and the remaining three came together and recorded after his death.

A pit opens up in my stomach.

“We’ll give the audience something unexpected!” Sam says. “A song the Beatles were never able to actually sing together. We will allow them to sing it now!”

“Real Love” was the song Faye and I danced to at our wedding. The song she whispered into my ear, promising that our love was real, yes, real.

“John!” Sam barks. “I want your voice to stand out more on the chorus! This is your song, mate! It’s all you!”

For our wedding, Faye wove tiny purple flowers into her hair that brought out the deep blue of her eyes. As we danced in the middle of the banquet hall, our friends and family gathered and watching, my arms solid around her waist, anchoring us together, she met my eyes and whispered the words along with the song.

My voice cracks in the middle of the last note. A lump in my throat. The band stops playing; I sense everyone’s eyes on me.

Yearning for Faye expands inside me like it could crack my ribcage.

“All right, everyone, let’s take five,” Sam says. He puts his hand to his forehead, sighing, and I know he’s disappointed. I’m not John Lennon today. I’m only me.

“You doing okay?” Bill asks. I hadn’t noticed him walk up beside me. His eyebrows are two thick, squirming caterpillars.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You seemed shaky there.”

I shrug. “Just need a little water.” I squeeze past him, walking up the steps from Sam’s basement to his kitchen. Standing at the sink, filling a glass with tap water, I try to push Faye from my mind. I need to focus.

The day I moved out, driving to my new apartment, I’d scanned the radio for a Beatles tune, any Beatles tune, but found nothing.

•••••••

Faye said joining the band was my version of a midlife crisis. Maybe she was right. Turning forty makes you pause, lift your head up, look around. Take stock of things. This is what I had:

a steady paycheck from a soul-draining job as an inventory analyst at United Airlines; a roommate-wife who passed me sections of the paper across the breakfast table and pecked me on the lips goodnight, but who I hadn’t had a real conversation with in months; and a teenage daughter who rolled her eyes whenever I opened my mouth and snuck twenties from my wallet to buy cigarettes. Not to mention the merciless monthly clockwork of mortgage payments, my ever-expanding potbelly, and the new ache in my left knee that seemed like some irreversible marker into the realm of the elderly. I was sagging into middle-agedness, prepped for a crisis.

And then one morning before work I popped into the coffee shop across the street from my office building and saw the audition flyer Sam had posted on the community bulletin board:

EVER DREAM OF BEING A BEATLE? NOW’S YOUR CHANCE! AUDITION FOR THE LIVERPOOL BOYS, A NEW BEATLES COVER BAND PREPARING TO PLAY THE CHICAGOLAND AREA!

I tore off a slip of paper from the bottom and stuffed it into my pocket. The rest of the day I kept reaching my hand in, feeling the wisp of paper wedged between my car keys and loose change, checking to make sure it was still there. I felt myself standing taller, lifted by the hope of something new, something different. Excitement buzzed in my chest for what felt like the first time in years.

I called Sam the next morning and auditioned for the band that weekend. I played “Rocky Raccoon” and “I Will,” two of my favorite Paul songs. The guitar strings were heavy under my fingers, and my voice was shaky. When Sam held up his hand to stop, I was sure he was going to tell me thanks, but no thanks. Instead, he asked if I could play “Strawberry Fields,” and before I’d even reached the second chorus, he clapped his hands loudly and said, “Yes! We’ve found our John!” Shaking my hand as we said goodbye, he added, “Welcome to the band. You’re a natural.”

•••••••

Everyone associates John Lennon with Yoko Ono. Hardly anyone mentions his first wife, Cynthia, the mother of his son Julian. He and Cynthia married in 1962, at the beginning of Beatlemania, and the Beatles’ manager insisted they keep it a secret. The fans wanted John to be single. When word got out about Cynthia and Julian, they received death threats from desperate women claiming to be in love with John. Once, a woman kicked Cynthia in the shins and told her to stay away from him.

“I don’t get why you admire John Lennon at all,” Faye said to me once. “He was a bastard.”

“He was brilliant!”

“Cheated on his first wife, cheated on Yoko. You better not get any ideas.”

•••••••

I hadn’t told Faye about the audition. She didn’t care much for my guitar playing. In the early days of our relationship, I tried to use the guitar to woo her, sitting beside her on the lumpy, patched-over couch of my college dorm and stringing together love notes into melodies, but it didn’t take me long to realize her smile was forced, pasted on. When I held forth with my secondhand guitar on my lap, her eyes quickly became glazed with boredom, staring into her own faraway thoughts as she pretended to watch my fingers on the strings. By the time we married, my guitar playing had taken on an edge of secrecy, of shame—a teenage boy’s pointless hobby. I only played my guitar in odd slivers of time when Faye wasn’t home, or outside, late at night, when I couldn’t sleep.

The first week of rehearsals, I tried making excuses of having to work late, but Faye could tell I was lying and confronted me. “Are you seeing someone?” she asked me point-blank, cornering me as I shaved after my shower. I’d wiped off a circle of the mirror to see my face; Faye’s reflection was nothing but a fogged-up shadow beside me.

“No, of course not,” I said. No other excuses or plausible explanations came to mind, so I told her the truth. I expected her to be embarrassed, to laugh it off. Instead, she seemed interested.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” she asked. “You didn’t have to hide it.”

“I wanted to surprise you,” I lied. “We’re playing our first show in a couple weeks, at Brewski’s Pub.”

Faye said she would be there, and in that moment I was happy. But as the date of the show approached, a steadily worsening anxiety gripped my chest. Just nerves, I told myself. Stage fright. What frightened me most was picturing Faye out there in the audience, her dark hair twisted up into a bun, her mouth set in a thin line, watching. Judging. If she came to the show, my fingers would fumble over the chords and my voice would crack when I tried to sing.

The day of the concert, after a restless night of strumming to the crickets in our backyard grass, I asked Faye not to come. Hurt leapt from her eyes, but she didn’t ask for an explanation. She never asked to come to another one of my shows.

People blame Yoko for breaking up the Beatles, but I think Yoko is a scapegoat. John and Paul weren’t just fighting because of Yoko. They were fighting because John was being a pompous, self-important asshole. Because he thought he was more important, more talented, than everyone else. The Beatles broke up because John wanted them to break up.

•••••••

Since the divorce, I get most information about my daughter through Faye. Sarah’s a senior in high school now, and she’s gotten into a couple state schools. Faye thinks she’ll end up going to a community college first, then transferring. I’m not sure what she wants to study. Faye thinks she’ll end up in some vaguely creative yet also practical-sounding career, like interior design or marketing. Every other weekend Sarah’s supposed to stay with me, but in the beginning, she seemed to always have an excuse for why she couldn’t come: food poisoning, a birthday party sleepover, a big science project that she had all the materials for at home. She never calls it her mother’s house—just home. After a while, I stopped trying.

I can’t get an entire weekend with my daughter, but sometimes I swing by and take her out for lunch or ice cream. When she was little, she loved rocky road sundaes. Now she just gets a small scoop of vanilla, letting half of it melt into a sticky pool in her cup uneaten while I ask about her studies and friends and drama club, because I can’t think of anything else to ask. When the silence bubbling up after Sarah’s one-sentence answers becomes too unbearable, I usually end up talking about the Beatles. I watch my daughter stirring circles into her melting scoop of vanilla, no doubt counting the minutes until she is back home in her mother’s house, while I ramble on helplessly about number one singles and backmasking, hoping that something I say will spark her attention, even if only for a couple minutes. It hasn’t happened yet. But I keep trying.

“Hi Sarah, it’s your dad,” I say onto her voicemail. “Just wanted to let you know my band is playing a concert next weekend, at Lincoln Hall, in the city. I’ve got a ticket for you if you want to come. I’ll leave it at will call.”

•••••••

We drive into the city together for the show, our equipment piled in the back of Sam’s white van. It’s a Friday, and the roads are congested with traffic. The clouds press down on the horizon like a down comforter, stifling. We’ve been on the road for maybe ten minutes when the snow begins. Sam hunches over the wheel, knuckles clenched. One of the wipers is broken, a line of rubber dragging across the windshield, forward and back, smearing condensation around.

We arrive late to Lincoln Hall, and everything is rushed, frantic. We only have time for a brief sound check before they want to let the audience inside the theater. In the dressing room, I button up my white suit, put on my long brown wig, straighten my round glasses. I look into the mirror; John Lennon stares back at me.

Sam ushers us upstairs, and we wait behind the curtain, listening to the hum of people on the other side. Blood pounds in my ears. I look down at my wingtip shoes to avoid Bill’s presence. A screech of feedback, and then the announcer’s voice booms over the sound system. “Let’s give a warm Chicago welcome for . . . the Liverpool Boys!”

The curtain rises. I pick up my guitar, fit its strap around me like an extension of myself, and stride onstage like I belong there. The bright lights make my eyes water. I strain to make out faces in the darkened room, searching for Sarah’s smile in the crowd. I can’t find her, but maybe she’s out there somewhere.

Paul counts us in, one two three four, and then my fingers are strumming out a melody I know as intimately as my own heartbeat. I raise my lips to the microphone. The crowd is cheering my name—“John John I love you John”—and I know it is not me they are cheering for, it is not me they love, but when I open my mouth to sing, what comes out feels more true than anything else in this life I’ve made for myself, so I soak in the cheers and applause and giddy shrieks—“sing it John”—and let myself pretend for a little while longer that it belongs to me.