The title is inspired by Bowie's 1973 hit Life on Mars and Bowie's recent i-album which goes to show a twilight man can still make it to the top of the charts [thought it a bit dirgy mesel...]
Suppose John Lennon had survived Chapman's assassination in 1980 : what would have transpired to allow the man to surmount the charts in distant 2013?
Here's my rather dark take.
Scrawny get that he was, John Winston Lennon, was well practiced with his fists. Mark Chapman went down from his first blow. He knew what to do next – follow up with the boot to the head.
*
The hospital window looked out onto the frosty New York skyscape. The heater purred.
Lennon felt true pain from where the bullet had shattered his knee. It began to surface again like an old-of-yore sea monster rising from the depths into the sun lit shallows. He tagged the switch on his drip and self dosed himself with dia-morphine. A thought of pure horror entered him: soon he would have to face his pain alone without his drip friend: heroin.
But he slept and then he went into a dream.
Three truly absurd figures presented themselves before his bed. A Rabbi complete with long beard; a Roman Catholic Priest with a three tiered tray that dispensed spiritual disinfectant and a Mexican in sombrero and Pancho.
Judgment Day had arrived as he always knew it would and he would have to account for his outrageous inhuman behaviour.
“F__ Hell, Lord, just blank me out now Just destroy me and eradicate me from the fabric of time, Please!”
“Steady on, Winston O'Boogie, your time's not not up. JUST YET!”, said the Mexican one as he whipped off his apocalyptic sombrero to reveal a magnificent head of hair.
“Ringo Starkey, I presume?” Lennon had recovered in an instant.
“Reporting for duty, Sir!”, (as he mimes a drumroll and cymbal crash).
“So who the f___ are you Jew boy?”
“Rabbi Harrison: Bar-Mitzahs, Funerals and Barbecues to order. Except on the Sabbath when I take a day of rest.”
“Thank God you've not bought that c__, McCartney, along too.”
“No, he's just a priest that looks like Paul.”
“That has to be the stupidest disguise...”
“No one's going to challenge a man of the cloth.”
“McCartney you wrote half the hymn book...”
“...and all the Granny Music,” his collaborator acknowledged.
“We might not make it out alive, John” volunteered Ringo.
“It's worse than Beatlemania down in that foyer.” George was not a man of exaggeration.
“They finally got the message,John. There's hundreds of them down there and they are all chanting 'Give Peace a Chance' “.
“That may be so, Paul. But if I'd smacked him harder, he would have never shot my kneecap to pieces. What I say now is:
GIVE WAR A CHANCE.