31 Years Later

    I was devastated when John Lennon died. For weeks, I went around in a fog of grief. I will never forget visiting my mom in Mexico about a month after Lennon's murder, with my then-boyfriend Phil Kinsey, and going out drinking at a local watering hole. We were all pretty inebriated, and my mom got into an argument with some tourists about seats--they claimed to be saving seats for their friends, who were in the bathroom. My mom loudly replied that there would be no saving of seats, we were going to  sit in them, and we did. It was a long table, capable of accommodating at least forty people. An argument broke out, and my mom scathingly referred to our adversaries as "plastic people." I was shitfaced drunk on tequila, and, thinking I was being hilarious, I said--"No, they're not plastic--they're cardboard. No, not cardboard--I know what they are--they're PLEXIGLASS!" The tourists were not amused at all, and one of them swung a beer bottle at my head--fortunately, she missed. I was oblivious to what had just happened, until my mother started shrieking, "No one swings a beer bottle at my daughter's head! NO ONE!" Phil, for once, was the most sober person in the room. He wisely decided that it was a good time to steer us out of the bar towards home, and softly kept repeating, "Leah and Polly--it's time to go..." as he pushed us toward the door. I could not bear the injustice of it all, the pettiness of the whole incident, and, at the exact same time that everyone else in the room fell silent, I yelled, "John Lennon is DEAD, and you people are fighting over chairs--you stupid fucking assholes!" My mom said that people talked about this for years afterward.