John Lennon Is Dead And It Really Bothers Me

I was born in 1962 in Houston, Texas, and spent most of my early childhood in a neighborhood called Pine Woods, where we had a small house on an oak-and-pine-lined street named Mulberry. My grandparents, my mother’s parents, lived five blocks away on a street called Hewitt. My mother was the oldest of ten, and she gave birth to me when she was sixteen, while her own mother was having her late-in-life children. My grandmother’s last two sons, Walter and Richard Gallagher, were around my age and more like brothers to me than uncles.

I never had any siblings of my own. My teenage father, perhaps having seen my mother’s gigantic family, ran out and got a vasectomy after I was born. He had to quit high school for a time, as did my mother, though both eventually got their diplomas. My mother went on to earn a master’s degree and works in healthcare in Houston. Though he never finished college, my father started his own insurance business, which now reaches all of Houston and the surrounding suburbs.

But back in the sixties, when everything and everyone seemed young and unsure, my father worked at low-paying jobs: pumping gas, loading railroad cars, delivering newspapers at night. My mother had just started her career as a nursing assistant and worked midnight shifts in the emergency room of the local hospital off the 610 Loop. What little social life they had revolved around my grandparents’ house on Hewitt Street. Not a day went by that we weren’t over there for dinner, or breakfast, or lunch. I often spent the night while my parents went to work. The next morning, I would walk to elementary school with my uncles Richard and Walter, the three of us escorted by my Aunt Mary Margaret, or Maggie, as everyone called her, who was on her way to high school.

I was always proud to be seen with my young aunt, as she was incredibly beautiful to me, with long blond hair parted in the middle, in the plain style of the late sixties. She had the strong chin and deep blue eyes of a Gallagher, only slightly exaggerated, her chin a tad more prominent, her eyes a deeper blue. She wore hip-hugger bell-bottoms, and when she baby-sat me, we listened to music together and she talked to me about her boyfriends and her worries for the future. Sometimes my mother would let her borrow our yellow Volkswagen convertible, and Maggie would take me for a ride with the top down and pop music on the radio. I can still see Maggie leaning over to me, the wind blowing her hair everywhere, singing along to the Archies, “Sugar, ahh, honey, honey . . .”

Like me, Maggie was a big chicken, afraid of everything, and at night we would often sleep in the same bed and tell each other scary stories until we held one another in fear, afraid even to get up because a murderer might be hiding under the bed, waiting to grab our feet and slit our throats. It didn’t help that our neighborhood was considered somewhat dangerous then. Police cars regularly careened down the streets of Pine Woods, and helicopters hovered over our homes, shining searchlights into our backyards and through our windows — which, Maggie and I felt, did nothing but drive the murderers indoors, and straight into our room.

I say I was proud to be seen with my aunt, but really any of the Gallaghers would do. The fact was, I wanted to be a Gallagher. Because I was usually with my pseudobrothers Richard and Walter, and because my facial features resembled theirs, people would often assume I was a Gallagher, and I would never correct them. At school, everyone knew not to mess with the Gallagher clan. My older uncles and aunts had all been attractive and popular athletes and scholars and had collectively ruled the school. Three of those uncles were now in Vietnam. The other older uncle, Peter, was a senior in high school and had declared that he would not fight in that distant country like his brothers. Peter was a hippie, and something akin to a god to me. He had curly brown hair and a thick beard, and he appeared strong and healthy: the exact opposite of me. I was thin and pale and always sick back then, in and out of the hospital with pneumonia or measles. Peter looked just like the picture of Jesus in my illustrated Bible. He was always flashing the peace sign, and I remember him showing me how to make one, holding my small fingers just so.

Most of my memories of that brick house on Hewitt Street date from the late sixties, when the house was filled not only with children, but with my father and his buddies, and my mother and her friends, and her sisters and their friends, and just about every person in the neighborhood, it seemed. There was a lot of drinking and smoking and dancing in their small living room. My Uncle Peter would play the guitar and sing along to Arlo Guthrie, and Father Parker, the parish priest, would let me sip from his large glass of red wine while he played cribbage with my grandfather. A former middleweight boxing champion in the navy, my grandfather was tall and lean and wore dark, horn-rimmed glasses, and all the women agreed he looked exactly like Cary Grant. My beautiful grandmother was always in the center of the room, her curly red hair practically jumping from her head, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She was constantly laughing and moving and cutting people to the quick. All life, it seemed, emanated from her.

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