Let Me Take You Down
I’ve been reading a long biography on John Lennon, one of my few true heroes. Beyond his talent, his sheer brilliance, knife-edged wit and willingness to experiment with music, words and society have always marked him as a role model of sorts for me.
Nearly 200 pages into the book, I’ve yet to crack the Beatles point on the Lennon time line. Meandering through his both unsettled and idyllic childhood and into his adolescent and teen years, I’ve come to find Lennon as the bad boy acting out to hide his soft spot that I can imagine having a real admiration for and friendship with.
Having just broached his days with the Quarry Men, I’m right now with a mischievous Lennon floating by in art school. I place myself in late 50’s Liverpool, and wonder if I’d have ridden with Lennon’s crew of artists and pint-enthusiasts — if I too would be a greasy haired Teddy, throwing off the yoke of stifling northern England with my drainpipe jeans, outbursts in art class and allegiance to making noise with my skiffle-cum-rock band that so wasn’t the trad jazz that ruled cafes and radio.
And then I remember: had I been born under the thundering punishment of the Luftwaffe, as John had in 1940, I’d have died long before Buddy Holly rocked the Mersey shores.
As a five week old infant in 1986, I was just barely saved by emergency open heart surgery. It took them hours to figure out what was wrong, and their more rudimentary surgery helped, but did not solve, my narrowed aorta.
No doubt that the British National Health Service, burdened both with bomb victims and undeveloped medicine, would not have been to able to save my life. Any chance of being a Beatle would have been cut short long before The Quarry Men were rendered drumerless when Colin Hanton got off the Liverpool bus with his kit.
History was one of my best subjects in school, perhaps because, always stifled by suburbia, loved to imagine times less restricted by the middle class formula and the FBI’s ability to track just about anyone down.
Yet every fantasy of life in ancient Greece or Medieval adventures were met with the crushing reality that I’d have died in infancy during those times — no leeches or witch doctor could open a narrowed aortic valve.
At 15, I received a metal aortic valve, which called for a daily dose of coumadin to keep it ticking without blood clots. It was a pain, but even worse was the notion that I was cut off from true adventure. How could I venture off into the world when I needed biweekly blood tests and crucial blood medication, lest I take the risk of having a stroke.
This was my Wilson problem — all I could think about while watching the movie Castaway was how dead I would be inside two weeks on that island, not for want of survival skills, but for lack of medicine. Tom Hanks used a coconut to knock out a troubled tooth, but no island fruit would thin my blood enough to prevent a stroke.
Of course, while I still hate the fact that I was born with this heart problem, I’m at least grateful that I was born when I was, with the medicine available to save my life. And while I can’t change that I would never have been a Beatle or Plato’s prized student, now that I’ve got a real valve and am off the Coumadin, I can make friends with volleyballs on all the deserted islands I want.
I’m getting the itch to just run away, and for once, it’s an actual possibility.
