He is looking at me from a poster on the wall of a bus stop and there is a little smile on the corners of his mouth. The years have been good to him; he is far from the bloated caricature that so many of his contemporaries have become. This is a man who has lived well because he gives so much.
The sun looks much the same from both sides of the gate, but it feels warmer on the outside. I haven't felt this warmth for twenty four years, and I'm just standing outside the gate, soaking up the sun. Free. Alive. Not a murderer.
I have spent many years considering what things might have been like if I was. Not so different for me, perhaps. Probably the only noticeable difference is that I would never have gotten a favorable decision from the parole board and the term of my incarceration would have had no upper limit. Maybe I would have been famous. I doubt anybody really thinks about me now. It's been ten years since anybody asked me for an interview. I'm okay with that.
Obviously things would be different for him, for the world who listened to him. There would have been no great '80s comeback. No reunion. There's no telling what today's musical landscape would sound like without his continued influence. And it's only been in the years that I've been in here that he's really found himself! If his legacy was only what he had done before I met him... tragic doesn't begin to describe it.
The cold sunlight on the inside is just one of the details that blurs into the surroundings. I don't get much human interaction. The way I'm treated, it's as if I had actually killed him, even after all these years. They still tell me that it's mostly for my own safety. I can understand the sentiment; I wanted to kill myself for a while. I didn't eat for almost a month once, early on.
I don't think anyone knows he wrote me a letter. I was still being fed through a tube at the time. He talked about how my actions had affected him. He was angry with me for a while immediately after, but he wanted me to know that he couldn't carry it around with him. He genuinely was a peaceful guy, even after what I tried to do to him. That Peace Prize a few years back was well-deserved.
I hear his wife has never forgiven me, though.
The early months, weeks, days in here were tough. It turns out that you meet a lot of angry and confused young men in prison, and we don't tend to play well with each other. God help you if you're in here because you tried to kill one of their biggest idols. Solitary saved my life. It also kept me away from the media. My fifteen minutes came and went pretty quickly.
You're probably familiar with the moment the judge handed down my sentence. The eyes of all the world were on me. It was a perversely glorious moment: the fruition of all my desires and dreams, and I didn't even have to kill him to get it! For most people, I guess the prospect of years in prison hits pretty hard when they hear it read out to them. For me, I would have been hit just as hard if the judge had bought my lawyer's insanity argument. I pleaded guilty, after all. How could I possibly get anything less than the whole book thrown at me? The newspaper pundits called me smug, but that only came after their reaction to it all when they continued to devote their newspaper inches and evening news sound bites to me for weeks afterward. No, in that moment I just felt utter peace as the words of justice fell on my attentive ears.
I think I was the only one who did any listening during the hearings. The district attorney had his tidy narrative of how I came to be the center of the universe and my lawyer did his best to discredit me as a simple lunatic. Neither one listened to the other, but despite my lawyer's best efforts my guilty plea was allowed to stand. The only downside was that I never got to sit in the front row of a packed courtroom, everybody staring at the back of my head as I listened to the witnesses' testimonies. I suppose we can't get everything we want, after all.
And so we come to that night many years ago in New York City, where this story begins. If I really wanted to, I could have killed John Lennon. But I fired five wild shots into the lobby of the Dakota building, and all of them missed, and for that we can all be grateful. Just imagine what we would all have missed out on if I had aimed more carefully.