I was a closet Beatles freak until about the time "Rubber Soul" was released.
Being a 14-year-old putz wasn't easy for someone who'd never planned on being one, but hormones and an unsuspected blast of teenage lonlieness provided lessons I was quick to learn. I was the Sneering One. The Smart-Ass. The Hypocrite who mocked his younger sister Karen's love of The Beatles while stealing time at night to listen to her albums, lying on the living room floor, his head between the twin speakers of his parents' stereo, playing "Beatles '65" at a barely audible level, fearful he'd be discovered -- yeah, hiding his love away -- eager to get lost in the bouyant, simple songs of lost love, threatened romance, and most of all the simple sonic joy that two electric guitars, an electric bass and a drum kit can bring a kid who finds himself alone in a world that seems stacked against him, that wants to keep him confused, resentful and fearful.
But I was a putz and The Beatles were a girl band and no self-respecting he-manly teenager could admit his love of The Fab Four. Even, in the beginning, to himself. Real manly teenagers dug The Stones.
I had reason to remember those teenage days while lying in a hospital bed two months ago, recovering from abdominal surgery and beginning to feel the tendrils of depression reaching out for a body slapped by circumstance as unexpected as adolescence into a dismal room, with a second-floor view of a scrawny treetop to my right and to my left a TV screen controlled by a fellow sufferer who took some inexplicable pleasure in viewing the Food Network all day.
Food -- real, chewable food -- was what I craved and it was what I was denied those first four days of my confinement. Every day I asked for it, knowing full well that when it arrived it would be a noxious farago of over-cooked vegetables, meat roll smothered in dead-white gravy and a square of glutinous "dessert" that would be as edible as a sponge. I wanted "real" hospital food only because its granting would signal my imminent departure from the hospital. With each passing day, it loomed in my imagination like the whale in Ahab's mind.
My nutritional needs were being met those first four days by a large plastic bag that hung over my left shoulder to which was attached a plastic tube through which coursed so much dextrose, among many other taste-free chemical nutrients, that I was regularly given insulin shots to counteract its effects. Watching Rachel Ray gad about her TV kitchen, whipping up a skillet full of sizzling sausage and peppers while babbling about her busy day was about all I could take, come the fourth day of my confinement.The tendrils were taking root.
On that day, I received not the bagel-and-cream-cheese of my dreams but something better: my daughter's laptop computer, which the hospital building itself did its best to defeat: there were only so many electrical outlets available in my space-capsule-size room, and most of them were plugged into some part of me. But Annie's laptop had a wi-fi card. Miraculously, the hospital actually provided wi-fi. Flawless wi-fi. Wi-fi that did what the hospital's menu couldn't do: provide blessed nurture for one of its ailing occupants.
It was there, on an otherwise sodden July afternoon, that I re-connected with my closeted past. In place of those big gray stereo speakers, a pair of tiny white ear buds. In place of my sister's platters, YouTube. For secretive volume, substitute full-blast sound.
At YouTube, I typed in "beatles hard day's night." I played it, listened, watched it -- the opening clip of the Richard Lester movie. I felt like I was watching history being made -- my own, and the world that was given birth with that bizarre opening chord -- "SPLANG! -- and the sight of four young men in suits and ties being pursued by a mob of girls.
Lying there, I took notes, in a shaky hand, not caring if it added up. But I couldn't stop making sense despite myself:
" The four of them in deep focus running toward the camera. George is down! He's up. They're all grinning. It's a game and they're running, running, running in their buttoned-down-and-tied-up suits, racing through a black-and-white world of hand-held movie motion, always a step ahead of a screaming horde of girls."
I played the clip more than once that day. Whenever I did, my hospital cell melted away. I was my old, skinny, secretive self again, lying on the living room floor but no longer constrained by my ideas and fears.
I was being fed, then as now. That opening chord was the moment everything changed for me. Here's what I wrote when I was finally ready to put the computer away, when I'd finally and for the first time during that miserable stay become satiated:
"Here I am nearly half a century later, tears in my eyes, resembling no one in the movie more than Paul's grandfather, knowing as much as it's possible for me to know how thrilling it must have been to be a lovesick teenage girl back then, screaming her head off for her favorite Beatle, sobbing at the pure mysterious pleasure of the chase she knew she could never win but running just the same, unleashing an innocent passion in an otherwise cold world, a passion that should never have been sneered at but rather treasured for the tender moment it was and the nourishing food it's since become for me."
To my sister Karen and all those lovely girls like her who threw their love to their smiling idols, however briefly, innocently or hopelessly, please accept the apologies of a a once-callow young man who didn't -- couldn't -- see you for the angels you were.


Salon.com
Comments
"Ah, you've got to hide your love away...."
Good to see you writing with more frequency. I take it the recovery has been on schedule.
I was recently confined to bed and bag for merely four days, and that was four enough.
Completely relate to your "outing" of yourself.
Risa: I lost 15 pounds on what ConnieMack calls "bag & bed" cuisine. I've gained it all back in two months.
Kris: The Stones are good for many things, but not the kind of nourishment The Beatles provide(d).
Blondie: You said it.
Patricia: You've given me the phrase that summarizes this post: The Beatles as soul food." Thanks!
Jim: One of the glories of pop culture is how many media are available to preserve the work that transcends all the bickering that attends a divorce like what the band suffered, not to mention the catastrophe of Lennon's murder. The music survives, it's beauties continue and even grow.
As for the recovery, it's continuing apace -- I'm back at work and, as you've noticed, filing more stuff at what I consider my writing home.
Lunchlady: I haven't been fair tomy roomie Bob, who was 80-something and just as miserable as I was. I exaggerated -- he got more considerate as time wore on, though his taste for old episodes of The Saint left a bad taste in my mouth.
Question: Is there a Lunchlady1?
Juliet: I've had my delirious days with The Stones -- most recently when I decided four key tracks of "Beggars Banquet" traced a discernible progress from (calculated) youthful rebellion ("Street Fightin' Man") to a more enlightened, seasoned worldview ("You Can't Always Get What You Want"). Seriously. There was a lot of debauchery in between which finally persuaded me to give it up and get down.
Marcelle: Cheers! Down the hatch.
Brie: I hope you don't mind my referencing you and Father Geary in my response to Token Tarheel above. He was my first and least useful confessor.
Connie: "Bag & bed" - exactly. I'm wishing you a visit from the bagel fairy even as I type.
I hope you are continuing well in your recovery and the food is getting more delicious by the minute.
*Blessings*
Great post, and I hope that you are well.
The music I listened to were comedy songs. Allan Sherman, Homer and Jethro, Spike Jones. What was called "novelty" music then, what's called Dementia Music now. Reminders that love and marriage were frauds and betrayals, that ordinary life was bound to be dull, that life on the fringe and at an angle was lonely but more honest than mundane life.
It was only later, in college, when the Beatles were done and over and subjects of academic analysis, that I found them. And while they were tolerable, they weren't nostalgic or interesting to me. They were reminders of the hell that was my childhood, and of how popular culture was full of lies for the people that swallowed it thoughtlessly.
--clever
Real manly teenagers dug The Stones.
-- yep
...beginning to feel the tendrils of depression reaching out for a body slapped by circumstance as unexpected as adolescence into a dismal room, with a second-floor view of a scrawny treetop to my right and to my left a TV screen controlled by a fellow sufferer who took some inexplicable pleasure in viewing the Food Network all day.
...a noxious farago of over-cooked vegetables, meat roll smothered in dead-white gravy and a square of glutinous "dessert" that would be as edible as a sponge.
I felt like I was watching history being made -- my own, and the world that was given birth with that bizarre opening chord -- "SPLANG! -- and the sight of four young men in suits and ties being pursued by a mob of girls.
-- all wow.
I give up.
This one speaks into the very roots of me, and is exceptionally well-written. Heartfelt. A pro at work.
And the ending is just sweetness itself: aching, beautiful, unexpected, lovely.
I've been distracted from OS for a bit and checked in today just in time to enjoy this great post. A reporter from my past used to try to work in a Beatles reference into his leads. He was successful a lot of the time.
(we'll have to have them all pulled out after the savoy truffle)
Sometimes it is these very moments of crisis that define who we really are and help us along the path to find out what our life contract really is and what we are actually meant to be doing. Cornily called "the wake up call" (I've been traveling the ak up path for 2 years now myself) it really is an alarm that jolts us out of false complacency and security and reminds us that life is so much more amazing than we give it credit for! BTW--I spent time with Paul McCartney in London in the 70's and I've been a Beatles fan since the "fab four" sang "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Was Just Seventeen" which I was 15 when it came out. I dreamed of being a long, straight blond-haired goddess with bangs and a skinny body. Alas, god gave me super curly hair although it was long and blond and I was skinny, but I was Jewish so I really didn't look quite like the English waifs I saw in the magazines. SO---this bit of nostalgia hit me with a blast from the past! Thanks.
"Is there a lunchlady1"? Not that I know of and being cute in meaning Too as in also does not seemed to have worked for me
SO here I am lunchlady2 . My sad but true story ;)
Spill baby!
Miss Kate: Blessings most welcome, as you know. Without wishing to strike a morbid note, maybe an open call on what music you want to accompany your final goodbye would be cool. Eh?
Ginny: Tell your husband to wise up. They could also rock as hard as anyone, testesterone-wise.
Sandra: Thank you. I've eaten nothing that was born in a vat or a petri dish and am doing my best to keep it that way.
Tom: I sought solace in the comedy albums of that era too -- Bill Cosby's "Why is There Air" still reverbrates in my noggin. And Allan Sherman! "My Son the Folksinger." -- "Hail to thee, fat person! You kept us out of war!" Genius. And novelty songs, usually summer releases, included people like Lieber & Stoller, Ray Stevens, even bluesman Slim Harpo and Lonnie Donnegan. Popular culture at its best was and still is a lifeline from the hell you describe, for me.
Geoff: A guy like yourself not digging The Stones? Not even for show? You must have been supremely confident in your teenage sexual identity. Not sure that makes you a lesbian, though, unless you fell for Freddy & the Dreamers.
And by the way, while we're on the subject of music, I think "noxious farago" would make a great name for a band.
Rated.
Maria: Speaking of journalism -- I hope all's well with the new venture. I love the idea of sneaking Beatles quotes by the desk. I've been around long enough to have had editors too old to recognize such things and now too young. But I need a job and I wanna be a . . . newspaper reporter.
Trilogy: The mending has begun. Thanks.
Maria:
Poet: Much obliged for those vibes -- I'll take all I can get. It too often takes a crisis to come to any kind of self-realization. A teacher of mine once described my immunity to understanding by saying I'd have to be strapped into an iron maiden in order for anything to get through. It's nothing I'm proud of, anymore.
And don't we all dream of being something (or someone) other than who we are? I only have to look at Paul's "clean old man" to recognize that fact.
Lunchlady2: I think Ginny Rose thinks you're a 1. I do 2.
Tom: I'm hoping to follow through on what we talked about -- an open call for great names of imaginary rock bands. Stay tuned!
I love this movie too and have written about it at OS, along with a couple of other bloggers. It's better that you came to this realization late than not at all. Get well soon!
It's amazing, the social pressures that are placed on children, especially during our era of social revolution, the 60s. I remember too, not allowing myself to like the Beatles (frankly, they're still pretty low on my list of favs). The Stones still rule as far as I'm concerned, along with CCR, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf (especially "The Pusher")
Ah Man! Now you have me huntin music on YouTube.
Excellent story JH. RATED cuz you made me go to YouTube :-)
I was an original Steppenwolf fan -- I remember singer John Kaye raised a lot of eyebrows by announcing he was going to run for office in CA. It seemed so . . .unhip at the time. Don't think he followed through though.
The Butterfly was scheduled to play Woodstock. Can't say I missed 'em though.
Thanks for stopping by . . .