Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 315: The Assassination of John Lennon Part I

Episode Date: May 5, 2018

It's time for John Lennon's assassin, Mark David Chapman! On the first of a two part series, we cover the formative years of Mark David Chapman and the slow burn that led to the assassination of an icon. Laser Groove Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Matt's Blues Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3

Before we get to the show, let's hear a word from our sponsor, New Belgium Brewing Company. Introducing New Fat-Tire Belgian White, a refreshing Belgian white ale brought to you by New Belgium Brewing Company. New Belgium Brewing Company is a 100% employee-owned brewery specializing in Fat-Tire Belgian style ale, the American classic craft beer. Inspired by centuries of Belgian brewing heritage, Fat-Tire Belgian White is a refreshing take on the traditional Belgian style wheat beer. Personally, I'm a big fan of the new Belgium Voodoo Ranger IPA.

You know, a couple weeks ago I talked about the sun coming out here in New York City and let me tell you, it is out. We enjoyed a couple of Voodoo Ranger IPAs out in our courtyard, while courtyard, meaning the concrete slab behind our apartment, we watched the sun go down over Brooklyn. To find Fat-Tire Belgian White near you by using the beer finder link at www.NewBelgium.com, that's www.NewBelgium.com. There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk.

On the left. Right above your glass. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? My daddy didn't like me and I shot John Lennon and that's why. What? I thought a reason to shoot someone. Oh, it's plenty of reason.

You didn't hear my stories about how bad my daddy was. Oh my goodness. It was so bad and I just had to go get that beer. Oh no. Get him. All right. Welcome to the last podcast on the left, everyone. I am Ben Kissel with Marcus Perks.

Hello. Marcus, how are you feeling? Ah, empty. Good. And of course we've got Henry Zabrowski there as well. Thank you for introducing me. When they did the colonoscopy. Colonoscopy.

Colonoscopy. My name is Alfred Colonoscopy. It's a curse and a blessing. You must be unpopular at the dances. How much shit do they take out? Like when they pull the tube out, does it blumps the shit? We started last week's episode with you talking about your dookie issues and I don't really want to hear about Marcus's.

No, no, no. You have to start a laxative process at 2 p.m. the day before where you have to drink 235 grams of mirror lax along with four tablets of dookie lax. All right. Well, let me try to segue speaking of Ronnie Dumps. Today's episode is about a real dumpy dude. I'm so good at this. Such a pro, man.

All right. We're going to cover this story, folks. Mark David Chapman. Oh, he's not a singer-songwriter who sings about running rivers and flowers in bloom. He's in fact... You got a fae's car. That's what I was thinking about. Oh, no.

I love Tracy Chapman. Mark David Chapman. Mark David Chapman. Mark David Chapman was a hypersensitive, pig-ish, Todd Rungren superfan who shot and killed former Beatle John Lennon just as Lennon was walking into his apartment building here in New York City in the late hours of December 8th, 1980. I tell you what, though, I went to prison and I lost 75 pounds.

And now you say pig-ish, I'm more turdly like a Dana Carvey bit. You remember that? How turdly can you get? You remember that massive disguise, favorite film of mine? Do you think that Todd Rungren does think, though, like, well, he is my fan? Yes. At least I have, like, a pretty, that's a big deal, fan. I'm going to go ahead and tell you this, that in 1981, Todd Rungren's next album after John Lennon was killed,

was called Healing. Oh, maybe he had a deep emotional reaction to being tied to one of the most tragic events of a century. Now, the accepted story is that Chapman was driven to kill John Lennon by the novel The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. And that's the story people want, for the most part, the simple straight line of cause and effect. Yeah, it's Fat Piggy Boy killing a phony for all the true innocence out there. But what do we know about stories and the fun urban myths that are built around them? None of the fun stories are real. It's always a halfway, like, diaper version of it when it's the chaos of real life.

What I'm going to say here, don't read. How many people have been led to violence through these books? Yep, Catcher in the Rye and Turner Diaries, both books inspired a lot of violence. No, no, no, no. Am I not getting the message? Am I getting the wrong message? You're getting the wrong message here. I'll learn here.

Because really, the story of Mark David Chapman is, like most of the stories we cover on the show, one of chaos. Yeah! Chaos reigns. It's a story driven by the selfishness and narcissism that has come to define the baby boomer generation. I will not let you malign the baby boomer generation because they brought us such wonderful artists such as Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, and Roman Polanski. Some of the best of the brightest of that generation. There's to be a baby boomer throughline there. No, we're certainly not saying that the entire generation is terrible.

After all, all of our parents are baby boomers. Our parents were fine. Honestly, my parents don't really swing the pendulum too far in the direction of, like, amazing people. I give my parents a solid C minus. My parents are wonderful. My parents are absolutely great. They're very supportive. They're actually listening right now.

Hello, hello, Mom. Hello, Mrs. Parks. Hello, Mr. Parks. But Mark David Chapman, without a doubt, personifies and magnifies the worst traits that that generation has to offer. One of those traits is an inability to take responsibility. And I think the generation actually shares that in the deification of John Lennon. Slam him, Mark, slam him. Because all my life, I've been hearing that the 60s truly died when John Lennon was shot, or at least the spirit of the 60s did.

But I think this is just another way to deflect responsibility, as it was the boomers who helped to elect Ronald Reagan into office in a landslide a full month before John Lennon's death. Which did far more damage to the concept of compassion than the death of any rock star could. Wow, I think the 60s died when they decided to switch protesting from taking it to the streets to taking it to the sheets. He laid in bed for like, what was that a week with Yoko? And he's like, we're doing this to protest Vietnam. It was a style of the time. It was a cool thing. He was trying to be cool.

He's a rock star. He was never, he never should have been a God, but he also considered himself a God. That's one thing eventually, if you go into the life of John Lennon, he wanted to be assassinated. He was obsessed with the idea. He thought that he would be canonized, which is why he would always try to downplay his influence on people saying, We're more like Lawrence and Hardy. People are like Gondi and the others are the ones that get themselves shot in the head. But it was the opposite for him.

Didn't he say the Beatles were bigger than Jesus at some point? We're going to get into that. I don't want to jump ahead. Well, I don't think John Lennon like wanted to be assassinated. I think he liked to play with the idea of it. I think he liked to think about it because he liked to think of himself as a leader. He liked to put himself on the same level as like Gondi or Martin Luther King. I mean, the guy was absolutely 100% full of himself.

And he does wear sunglasses better than Gaddafi did. So he was a leader to some degree. But also as a person that as a show business, I am, you know, a version of a flim flam man. This is what we do. We work at show business. I can't help but acknowledge the perfect arc my life would take if I was murdered by a fan, which makes this episode doubly scary in my mind. It's a part of it's like knowing how good that would be for the show.

It's the same reason you're not going to see a ghost or a UFO. You want it too bad. You're like one of those guys who tries to get suicided by cops and the cops just put their guns away and be like, I'm not going to shoot this guy. He's too desperate for it. I'm dangerous. I'm dangerous. Well, back to the boomers. The boomers like to fuck and they like to get high.

And when that got old, they instituted as many selfish and callous policies as they could. Chapman didn't kill the compassion of the 60s. Policy did. Oh, world star. And as far as catcher and the rise concerned, Mark David Chapman, he was going to kill somebody eventually. Because these types of people always find a way to justify their stupid bullshit. And to make something out of yourself, you have to try really hard and you have to work really hard and develop some sort of expertise on something. You have to try something. You have to get a job.

You have to work hard to not be a dumpy asshole. It's really easy just to shoot somebody and get put in the newspapers. Absolutely. We talked about that on the side stories this week. Now, concerning like Mark David Chapman, it just so happened that the two main ingredients in the soup he eventually served happened to be JD Salinger and John Lennon. Ooh, Salinger Lennon soup. It just tastes like lime, just like a fucking, like a guy's got his foot in it. Yeah, gets served in a fedora.

Before we get into that story, though, we have to acknowledge our main source here. Book is called Let Me Take You Down by Jack Jones, published in 1992 just as Mark David Chapman actually started telling the truth behind the motivations of these crimes. So without further ado, let's get into the life of Mark David Chapman. All right. This is him just trotting along with his fucking big, big, turtle face, his stupid hair slapping back and forth his tiny little dog eyes.

Mark David Chapman grew up in various places around the South, but always considered his hometown to be Decatur, Georgia, which is a suburb of Atlanta. Okay. Chapman's life was a tapestry of hypersensitivity and overreaction starting from childhood. If Charles Manson was the dark side of the 60s come to life, Chapman was its blubbering after birth. Okay. You forced me to imagine a red, white, and blue vagina,

like it's a part of some kind of performance art piece. Charles Manson pressed his face out of it and he's going like, never mind everybody, I'll just stay in here. And then him just starting punching the clip like it's a punching bag and a gym. Charles Manson inheriting both his father's abusive nature and his mother's narcissism, Chapman believed from a young age that he was destined for greatness, all because that's what his mother constantly told him. There's a fine line between being like super mean and being hard on your kids

so they crumble, but you also can't be too nice to them. Tell them they're good. You're good. But you know, if you want to be great, you got to really try. His mom was very like, what's the term? She's very winsome. She was very whimsical, very sweet woman. She would always make songs and sing and dance.

She was trapped in a very abusive relationship with Mark David Chapman's father. And part of it was that she put her fantasy life on to Mark. It was all very much so being like, you're going to be the bestest boy ever. Anybody's ever met because of your beautiful hair and your tiny eyes. And he's like, is it real mama? Is that really what's going to happen? And she's like, we'll see. Yeah, it's one of those things.

It happens with narcissistic parents a lot where their life sucks. They're trapped. It's over for them. So their only chance for greatness is to put everything on their child. And sometimes, you know, the kids can get out of this. They can grow out of it. But sometimes it just fucking ruins them. Is it possible to draw a parallel between Tonya Harding?

Look at the act of violence. Obviously she didn't do it. But it does seem to be like, how do you get success real quick? But the problem, the difference is that Tonya Harding actually put in the work. Tonya Harding was fantastically talented. Tonya Harding worked like a fucking mad dog to get where she was. We are closer to Tonya Harding. Because of how much work we put in it and we don't have ready for TV faces.

We had to go out there and really be the best of the best in order to do what we can. Yes, I would like to go fishing with Tonya Harding. She's very good at it. Now, Mark David Chapman, he believed all this bullshit that his mother fed him. But the one thing that his mother failed to teach him is that you actually have to put in the work to be great. Chapman always believed that greatness was going to be handed to him. And anytime it wasn't just handed to him, he fell apart. It wasn't even just greatness.

It's that everything had to be a fucking epic story. He thought every single thing that was supposed to happen to him was going to be this grand adventure that he was the center of because of the stuff that he was into as a little kid. And because of his mom's encouragement and his weird inner fantasy life. And then it's like, no, life doesn't work like that. There's a lot of disappointments and you have to work really hard to get past obstacles. And if you don't, you fail. Everyone is actively trying to stop you.

Everyone. It's not all times. I used to think like, maybe I'm thinking a little crazy. No, they are actively trying to stop you. Chapman's origin story, if you can call it that, had its setting on a schoolyard playground. He said a kid gave him a wedgie. And when the other kids noticed he had a couple of skid marks, they said he'd shed himself. He's skid marked.

Well, then you start having to cut your butthole hairs because you got dingleberries in there that are dragging across your underwear material. But he did this. His stories of his childhood were very pathetic. That's how I would put it. And I think mostly this comes from the fact that when we hear these stories, it came from when Mark David Chapman was already arrested and talking to many psychologists that were all trying to figure out why did this guy kill John Lennon,

who we all believe to be the most beloved superstar in the world. Mark David Chapman at the time was the most hated man in the world. So when Mark David Chapman starts telling these dumb shit little stories about his childhood, they're hanging on every word. And so everything we know about his life came from his mouth. And so it's shit like he was talking about. They ask him, like, where do you think his revenge streak came from? And there's a story that he said.

He's like, there was another friend, a male friend I used to play with. His name was Borden. I remember having a spat with him over something. Whatever it was about, it really bothered me so much that I drew up these posters that said, Wanted Borden and so much money for a reward. I took my father's hammer and nails and went all over the neighborhood putting these posters up on trees. I guess that's pretty unusual to go in all that trouble to get revenge on somebody at that age. I was only five or six old then.

I can't even remember what it was that he did that made me so hateful. That's true. That is a direct quote from Mark David Chapman. I wasn't Henry just making shit up. No, and this is another one. I remember another humiliating incident a few years later when I was in chorus. One guy named Neil, he used to torment me. He would bend his middle finger so the knuckle was prominent and smashed me right on top of my leg.

It was really painful. I could never challenge him and I could never hit him back. I would look over at him and he would put his hand on his chin like nothing happened. So what I did was, I got an idea in my mind. I was going to learn karate. A karate place and I had to leave a message on a phone beeper. Wouldn't you know it? The next day in school, Neil came up to me and he knew all about it.

He had been in the karate studio when I called them. This whole thing started with a wedgie and just it's really, relatively mundane kid behavior. We all got it a heck of a lot worse than that. I'll tell you that. Dude, personally like all the wedgies I got as a kid, like they just blur together into one big wedgie. Isn't sure they do for like all three of us. I got to say it is not good when you look like blaster for master blaster and you're 13 years old. You're six, seven without pubic care.

Both of your older brothers are gay, but they decided to leave the school when you had to model and when you graduated. That was an entire year of a waking nightmare. Oh, yeah. Like when you're five foot tall, but you have hands and feet the size of like comparable to minute bowls and you look like a tiny little monkey. Yeah, that shit ain't gonna fucking work out. Well, I was pushed down in a bathroom of a community pool and all the bigger boys pulled my towel away and everyone made fun of my penis. You know, why isn't it strange? We've all come together to do a true crime podcast.

A lot of the bathroom was a very dangerous place in high school. Same thing in prison. Well, Chapman about just his wedgie, just the one wedgie. He said he never, ever got over this experience saying it was the beginning of his life as a nobody. Oh, God. No, I mean, we got to say his home life wasn't ideal. You know, his father was abusive and he'd beat Chapman's mother on a regular basis and Chapman turned to him at a very young age as a protector and a confidant. Like, let me take you down quotes a psychiatrist who says that this type of behavior plays a big part in creating a narcissistic personality.

It flips the parent-child dynamic and gives the kid a sense of importance that they aren't ready for and the kid sees themselves as more powerful than they actually are because they in essence are protecting one of the most powerful people in the world, a parent. So is this like when Bundy loved his very abusive grandfather? So Chapman was, he liked his terrible dad? No, he hated his terrible dad. He hated his terrible dad, but because he was protecting his mother from his terrible dad. Oh, I see. Essentially, he was protecting the most powerful person in his world, his mother. And when these people, when they get out into the actual world, they find that that power doesn't transfer.

I see. And they feel useless and powerless. And it just comes out in horrible ways. If you're already a pathological personality, which we're going to find out too about Chapman, is that they also have no idea what to diagnose him with later on in life, is that his grandiose versions of himself feed into his mother's grandiose visions of him as well. And the two of them together kind of bring the worst out in each other. But also, it's debatable about how badly she was abused. It's very fucked up because his mom was saying it wasn't as bad as he says, which I think is also her trying to distance herself from what happened. But Mark David Chapman also was like, I was the only one who could protect my mother, which I also think is like, you're not the rock. If I need somebody to look to for protection, I'm going to call up JCVD.

I don't know what you're doing. Sean Claude Van Damme. Well, this power not transferring. Now, like this could be why about the only place where Chapman felt like he was a somebody was when he was at home. Because that is where the little people lived. I hate this shit. Interesting. So much.

Yeah. I got to say, you're a nobody at home. You're the kid. You are. Listen to this. No, Kissel, the little people. Oh, okay. The little people were denizens of a make believe society Chapman created as a child that lived in apartment buildings in his walls.

And he would summon them from the walls to go out to work in little stores and communities and stuff that you would envision in front of him. And they worshiped him. And he they would call them King Mark. And he would make them dance for him. And he would also he would murder them when he was angry. He rocks to yeah back and forth constantly. He play Beatles music all the time and just rock back and forth and go. King Mark, King Mark, they're all worshiping King Mark King.

And it's like very creepy. Well, you know, it's very creepy. This is the part of the episode where I kind of like our main villain. That's fun. That is kind of fun. You got a whole community. It's like, what is that bed knobs and broomsticks or something like that? There's all these old Disney movies, a lot of little people running around.

And it's a good time. You actually do check because he loved old Disney movies as well. We'll get into that. Little people running around. I used to have Playmobil because my father is German and I used to talk to them, set them all up. I never gave myself to God position though. Well, it wasn't God. It was Monarch.

Monarch. He was king of them all. They gave him adoration when he wanted it and they were brutally murdered when he was angry. Honestly, I would entertain them. That's what I would do. I would have my WWF figures at the time and I would entertain them. And of course, they would entertain me sometimes too. That's what happened.

That is what happened. That's what he did. You are him. In that moment. In that moment. You know what I don't do? Read. Hello.

This is why I am not a killer. During the angry times, Chapman would make like those little kid war noises. Pretty good. And then he would smile as the little people died by the thousands. Trapped under fallen buildings and just like scrambling around in little ambulances. And he would smile approvingly. Hey y'all little people, did you just a reminder? There's no such thing as meaning.

Each y'all live in an existential crisis void in which I punish you endlessly. Thank you, King Mark. You're welcome. God, it feels good honestly. I should start doing this. Now I'm up, now I'm back. And when the little people pleased Mark, he rewarded them with music from his favorite band, The Beatles.

Okay. Chapman, he'd even built tiny little Beatles of his own on a cardboard stage using toy soldiers who had little cardboard instruments and they stood in for the Fab Four. Okay. Which is kind of cute. That is kind of cute. It is sort of cute. Infuriating.

It's infuriating. It makes you really mad. As an older man looking at your kid doing it, you just want to be like, I understand you're expressing your imagination. But weren't the Beatles, they weren't necessarily a child's music, weren't they? Don't get anywhere. They were for everybody. Were they kind of changed?

Yeah, back in the day. Yeah, it was like 12, 13 year old. Like if you listen to those concerts, like the Shea Stadium concert, one that was just released like last year, like the noise from the crowd is the most high-pitched, constant whine that you've ever heard in your fucking life. It's insane to listen to. So it's a teeny-bop type crowd there. Very much a teeny-bop type of crowd.

Yeah, all the adults were listening to the Stones. Yeah, dude. If I can kill our hardcore music, man, deep purple, man. Fuck that. Like fucking fog hat. Can't hold it. Well, that definitely came a few years later. That came at the end of the 60s, but at the beginning of the 60s.

Yeah, fucking fog hat, dude. That's the only I can shit about, man. Well, that was the early 70s. Early to mid-60s. Oh, man, fucking love it, dude. It got a divina, man. When does Sticks come around? Mid-70s.

Early to mid-70s. That's more your time. I like to sail away. I like Dad Rock, man. I like anything I can wash my car to. Long songs. Well, Chapman would sit and listen to Meet the Beatles, his only rock record, and project it through his head into the homes of the little people.

And when he did so, they would cheer their monarch, saying, according to Mark... Mark the king of music. Mark the king of the little people. Long live the king of the little people. It sounds like the version of Ash when he's like a bunch of little ashes running around in Evil Dead. Or was that Army of Darkness? One of those.

And King Mark, I have one request, love what you do, tremendous work, absolutely fabulous work. Everybody's very, very happy here. Notice there's been a great deal of dildo stores opening up, and I wouldn't like maybe to say, we need a tailor or some form of grocery store, so... But there was one thing about the Beatles that Mark didn't like. Uh-oh. And so he couldn't quite put his finger on why.

He said he'd look at the record sleep for Meet the Beatles, and he'd be fine with three of the Beatles. But there was just something about the face of one of them that he didn't like. If he's making fun of Ringo again, I go through a big leave him alone to Ringo. He's never done anything wrong. Oh, no, no, no, no. Ringo's fine. Okay.

The Beatle that Mark David Chapman didn't like was John Lennon. Okay. The reason why he said he didn't like it, which I kind of understand, thin lips. Is that really the reason? He said that John Lennon had thin British lips, which he did not like, which I understand. I get that, yeah. Because British guys have like no cushion. Right.

Above their chins. I imagine kissing a British man's like kissing a fucking skeleton with their weird craggly teeth and their long noses. But that is not a reason for it. How old is he when he just gets obsessed with the lips of John Lennon? Six, seven. Well, like Meet the Beatles was about 61. So he was probably like somewhere between like six and 10 years old.

Oh, that is such a strange reason to hate somebody. It's a very strange thing. I think about being the psychologist. He just murdered John Lennon. He has just spent 35 minutes telling you this story about the little people. And you're sitting there trying to make notes, just being like, and what else? I knew he destroyed them. And then they heralded you.

That's great. And let me tell you another thing. Sometimes I'd give them little outfits and I'd give them fun hats and fun shoes and fun jackets. And I'd make them Spanish one day and the next day I'd make them Chinese. Any day I make them different. And it's just like, great. This is great.

Let's get back to John Lennon. Yeah. Let's get back to figuring out why we, why did you shoot John Lennon? I think his psychotherapist must be like Ben Stiller's psychotherapist in something about Mary. Remember that when he just comes in late after eating the sandwich, just like, and we're done. I'm sorry.

Well, a few years later, Mark forgot all about the little people and discovered masturbation as we all do. Constructive use of his time. Yeah. I'm happy he didn't just like, we've got a fire unit now and incorporate the two. That's good. Well, Chapman said his sexual awakening came one day as he was watching a Doris Day movie on TV.

And this was later Doris Day. All right. After his first encounter with himself, Chapman started masturbating up to seven times a day, always using mature women as his objects of fantasy from older movie stars to teachers to women from church. This is totally all the time. Yeah. I mean, that's not too far out of the realm of normal.

Seven was like that. Seven's a lot. He's not busy. He's not involved in after school activities. But yeah. That's a special day. Like that's when you're home alone like all day long. Yeah.

Most I ever got was five. I had no idea. Five was your most? Five was my most. Yeah. That was the most I could go. I could say that. I think the last time I did this was when I was living in a hotel in Toronto.

That was like a year ago. Yeah. Yeah, dude. 2015. 2015. I had a whole Sunday, man. Wow. Nice.

What was that for? Heroes Reborn? Yeah, dude. NBC Thursdays, 9 p.m. Heroes Stillborn. Still. It is great. It still works.

Man. It's still funny. That's funny. He gets cast in things. But then they get castled. They stop. They stop going. So it's like he's doing good.

And then all of his actor friends are jealous. But then they feel good. Doesn't make it. Hasn't made it to the end of a season yet. Don't have to. Don't have to, man. Interestingly, Chapman had the same fantasy that many sociopaths like him have when they're starting to sexually blossom.

Chapman fantasized about having all of his mature objects of affection lined up and naked in a secret dungeon in the basement of his school. I know it's misogynist, but how annoying would the basement be, eventually, where they'd be like, you got to go to church. What are you doing, masturbating? You got to go to flute. All the melony eventually. You're fired.

You're all fired. Yeah, it would be a lot. But he almost never pictured actual sex with these women. He only pictured touching. And this would be one of his lifelong hang-ups. He said, in his words, that the warm wetness of a woman scared him and made him feel like he was going to be swallowed up inside. If you put it like that, it's horrifying.

I say the opposite. I kind of thought that's the goal. He's definitely not a crumb type. Crumb was like, how do I burrow in deeper? In fact, despite eventually being married, Chapman said that he could count how many times in his life that he'd had sex. Oh, total. Total.

Oh, wow. At 25. He was very scared of it. He was very scared of any sort of intimacy. And I think a lot of it's got to do with, I'm going to put my serious cap on and my therapist glasses. And what I think it's got to do with is it's truly, he is a shallow surface level human being with no real anything behind his eyes.

So what's hard is that when you are making love to somebody, what you hope is that there's a sense of true intimacy. And I think that facing that intimacy, facing like someone seeing your own face, which is us at our worst, it's hard to show that to somebody so you then abstain from doing it. You then abstain from doing anything whatsoever. Today's other sponsor for last podcast on the left is Blue Apron. Blue Apron is the number one fresh ingredient and recipe delivery service in the country. And it's on a mission to make incredible home cooking accessible to everyone.

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So pretty soon after Mark David Chapman discovered masturbation, he was introduced to drugs. This is about the age of 14 or so. And with that, Chapman found an identity for the first time, actually calling himself and making other people call him Mark the Freak. So cool. You can't give yourself a nickname. No. That is not allowed.

Well, because you can't make your buddies also call you King Mark. No, that's true. You'll be like, we have the little people call me that. Who? Who are you talking about, Mark? Nobody. They're dancing on the top of my feet right now. I got a couple in my bag.

So this is pretty normal though. So he's in his early teens taking some drugs. We're talking LSD, some pot. A lot of LSD. Mostly LSD, actually. All right. And now he's masturbating. This seems like he could end up okay.

He totally could end up okay. He is on the path to becoming a comedian. Yeah. That's basically it. And he actually did try his hand at being a comedian in, I think, like the mid-70s. Him and his friend moved to Chicago and they did a bunch of skits and bits. Oh my God, do we have any? Do those exist anywhere?

I need to see those. It is brutal. He was a sketch comedian for about six months in Chicago. No kid. And that is the truth. Yes. It's later on in his life. I don't think we're going to cover it in detail.

But nothing was a detail that was a stronger punch in my gut than looking at him being like, he was a fucking sketch comic. Sketch comic. Wow. We've got a nerd alert here, folks. Well, at this time at 14, Chapman was what was known as a garbage head. A garbage head was a guy who would take- But, guys, can you call me the freak?

I don't know. I don't- Garbage head. No, I don't like- Oh, man, what do I got to do? Hey, look at- I have my shoe- My left shoe was on my right foot and my right shoe-

Garbage head. Well, a garbage head was a guy who would take anything that changed his consciousness even a little. He was kind of a guy that eventually grew into being like, you know that if you smoke some, like, dishwasher liquid, it gets you high. And they're like, no, Mark, that's not true. Like, try it. And they all try to be like, you feel it? You feel it? Yeah, I think I do.

I think I'm high. Yeah, I'm high. Yeah, everyone's farting bubbles. Well, when he wasn't doing that, he was sniffing a lot of glue and sniffing a lot of lighter fluid all before school. That's the good glue they used to give the kids back in the day. Remember that? It used to come, like, basically on something where it's like, put it on your lips. Why don't you just see how it tastes? It came on, like, a perfect application where, like, just rub it on your tongue.

But Chapman's drug of choice was acid. Okay. And in drugs, Chapman said he finally found the, quote, unquote, in-crowd. And just like anyone who bases their entire personality around their drug habit, Chapman was insufferable. All right. One night, while tripping and listening to Pink Floyd's righteous album, Umaguma, Chapman picked up a knife while all of his friends were sleeping and almost stabbed him all to death. Okay, this is the thing about Chapman. Yeah, Chapman was one of those.

Don't laugh at me. Umaguma was fucking me. No, I'm not. I'm not. I'm sure it's right. The name is purposely funny. Yes. It was done by a bunch of stone people, four stone people. Yeah, exactly.

No, I was just, I wasn't expecting the, I didn't think he was going to start stabbing his friends or going. That's kind of a leap there. You know what it was? You know, when you're in a group of friends to do drugs a lot, there's always one that's like super fucking dramatic and a waste everybody's time. Chapman was like the guy that you'd have where it's like everybody's doing drugs and it's like a guy at the very end. It's like, there's a ghost in me. There's a ghost in me, guys. He's like ruin everybody's night and you have to go. It's all about him now because he's sitting there saying like, I'm a stab.

Yeah. I think I'm going to stab you like, no, Mark fucking chill out. Man. It's like, he's just always had to be the center of attention. Then not too much later, Chapman tried stabbing his dad, but his dad quickly disarmed him while Mark was just repeating that like hippie cop out phrase. Like, it's cool, man. It's cool. It's cool.

It's cool. It's cool. No, it's not cool. It's really taking a knife from your hands. It's not cool. Acid is not a very good drug to be violent on. Can you do that, really? Yeah, you can. Oh, yeah.

You definitely can, yeah. But Mark David Chapman, he just couldn't handle the shit. He was one of the many, many people in the 60s, 70s and beyond who had no business whatsoever doing hallucinogens, especially at such a young age when really nobody should be doing acid. No. Nobody should be doing acid at 14. It's an 18 and up type of activity. But you really don't think you should. I feel like getting it out early is nice.

No, it fucks up your head. Yeah, it stumps up the brain. Aw. It makes your front to low ball like, we're not going to come in. Aw, no, man. Yeah, because hallucinogens, they could be. Fog hat, man. Fog hat, man.

Fog hat, man. Fog hat, man. Fuck me. How the heck can you even have a hat of fog? It doesn't even make sense. Yeah, like hallucinogens, they can be a wonderful experience when you're older. I mean, fuck like shrooms at like 2021 totally changed my life. But it has been proven that there could be consequences if you do them too early.

And some theorize that Chapman's way too early experiences with acid in effect help to break his brain effectively removing the barrier between fantasy and reality. Take for example, Toby Tyler, 10 weeks with the circus. Toby Tyler. 10 weeks with the circus. 10 weeks with the circus. Why am I repeating everything? Technically, that is just one contract run with a circus.

10 weeks with the circus. Starring a mousketeer named Mucci and a chimp named Mr. Stubbs was a Disney movie that featured a child protagonist named Toby Tyler who runs away from home to join the circus. Okay. One was murdered by suicide and one was murdered by cops. You decide. You find out which one. Chapman, in his first accidental step into inserting himself into the world of fiction,

accidentally stumbled into the world of Toby Tyler, one of his most beloved movies when Chapman was about 15 years old. Like many kids his age in the early 70s, Mark Chapman figured he was going to leave the squares in his small Georgia down behind and run away to a more happening spot where all the freaks were having a groovy time. Oh yeah. Hell yeah, if I got that. But the way he did it, the way he ran away was also like very suspect because he's 14,

15, he would go to these taxi drivers, he'd set up all this shit to go to the airport without his family knowing by having paying a taxi driver ahead of time to meet him at a diner, a couple of streets away from his parents' house, and then they did it. They took him to the fucking airport. It was a different time. You know, if I know anything about the circus, the performers are a love and life. They don't just chain smoke and drink every single night. A bearded woman is in heaven in an affair with the clan boy.

A lobster guy is just loving his wife and his family. Well at this point, like he wasn't planning on running away to the circus. You know, he was just planning on running away. But instead of going to California, which was the logical choice, Chapman instead just told all of his friends that he was going to California. And instead went to that hotbed, a 60s counterculture that was Miami Beach. Not a good choice, the opposite choice. But also the way he was running it too, I mean, again, he's such a loser.

There's a part of me that feels a sense of contempt for Chapman. And the reason why I feel it is because I identify my own vulnerabilities inside of it. When I look at him and you see the dumb activity of a 14-year-old and it mirrors, for me, the same activity that I would do and it makes me hate him. And what he did was walk around and set up this whole mystery thing, being like, going to California. And they're like, oh yeah, you're going to fucking California fucking Mark the Freak. Because you know that also eventually that became an ironic nickname for him.

Because he just put on bell bottoms and a leather jacket. And he's like, oh yeah, I'm going to California where all the girls are because that's where I do best is when all the girls are around. And they're like, yeah, Mark, have fun in California. See you there. We're actually on our way there too. So after staying a night on Miami Beach, Chapman found a couple of hippies. Did you see the detail?

When he got into the cab, he arrived at the Miami airport. He got in the cab and the cab driver was like, so where do you want to go? And he's like, take me where the freaks are. And so he just dropped them at the fucking beach. So this dude, he was in Georgia and he just got in a taxi, got on a plane and ended up in Florida, Miami, Florida. And you could just do that then, huh? Yeah.

You know, I don't like the TSA, but I think there should just be like a child, just to stop children. Just a low level. Just a small. A kid with too much swagger and his newly acquired fucking bell bottoms. Well, you have to be able to check these kids. What he actually did is that he dressed up nicely for the trap. He dressed up really nice so no one would look twice at him.

And he kept all of his hippie clothes in his backpack. And as soon as he landed in Miami, he went into the bathroom and like changed into his bell bottoms and his, you know, snowy shirts. Man, it's kind of a cute story. It is sort of. The way it ends. It really is. And that's one of the things we're going to see about Mark David Chapman

is that he does have these adventures. Yeah, he does actually have the courage in himself to like have these adventures. And there are times in his life when he could have totally turned into becoming a regular dude, just like a normal person with, you know, that had a weird childhood, very similar to the childhood that we all had. But instead he went in a totally different direction and he had one last adventure. Yes, but one that ended in murder. I wonder if John Lennon would have gotten his lips plumped up.

You know how that was kind of in the, it was kind of a phenomenon there for a little while. Maybe that would have helped helped. No, it's happening right now. He'd be 75 years old with the Kylie Jenner fucking lip suction thing on his fucking face. Going like, all my new electronic album everybody likes it. It's about waffles.

Like great. All right. He's still making music. So Chapman, after staying a lonely night in the sand of Miami Beach, found a couple of hippies and tagged along for a few days and got a true taste of the freak lifestyle. These guys shoplifted, begged and slept in concrete sewer pipes at a construction site. This shit was not romantic at all.

Free living, man. That's what they're talking about, man. It's all about defining the cracks. And sometimes it's like where the cracks are. That's where your family is. And hippies, man, when he came into the hippie community, because he knew then these are the only people that are going to accept me. These are my people.

And so, yes, I'll go with these weird derelicts that will steal everything from me as soon as I turn my back. But at one time, they let me sleep in a pipe with them. Isn't that nice? And they called him Mark the Garbage Head. Now, the goal for these guys was to get enough money to go to a music festival at the Everglades Speedway the following weekend. That's the goal.

What about an apartment? I mean, hippies are... Man, look, you kissle with your fucking capitalist fucking bullshit. All you want is some kind of career and some kind of, like, you want an apartment, and you want, like, fucking shoes and shit. Go fuck yourself, man. I'm just trying to get to the festival, man. All right, well, who's playing at the concert?

Who's at the concert? Actually, the 1968 Miami Pop Festival had a fucking great lineup. Like, Hendrix was there. So, after that, can we get an apartment? This is... That's all that I'm asking. My back is hurting. But this is like the 1971 Miami Pop Festival.

And I couldn't find the lineup for this one. Presumably, it was still pretty good. But it was probably the difference between, like, Coachella in, like, 2005 compared to, like, Coachella now. So, we got, like, 99 Woodstock. We got Biscuit performing. I would say that... I would say that...

...90 Pop Festival 1971... Dude, you got fucking... ...was probably closer to Woodstock 99. ...was probably closer to Woodstock 99. Sticky fingers there. I bet sticky fingers there. I bet the Apple Bottom boys fucking show up. I bet the band that Jenna Shoplin left to go die was there.

I bet there's a lot of heavy hitters there, man. Yeah, Dr. Hook, you know, all kinds of fuckers. All the guys. Dr. John, the other Dr. musician. Dr. Demento. I loved that time in music where I was like, I don't know, I don't have a name. Dr.

And you know what? We're going to go with Sergeant Pepper. I'm going to be a Dr. John. Oh, about the military. Nobody makes a song about the military and that's an awesome John. That's a good old Apple. Actually, Dr. John and Dr. Hook, MC'd by Dr. Demento, sounds like a fucking fantastic concert.

Dr. John's great. Yes, I would see that. Such a night. Well, before they got to the Miami Pop Festival at the Everglades Speedway, Chapman ran out of money and his new friends told him, like, you know what? You go on ahead. We'll meet you there.

Y'all may hit me friends, right? We'll be friends forever, right? Yeah. So I'll just go and I'll meet you at the concert and then you'll show up with food and money in a way for me to live. Can you do that? Yeah. All right.

Well, promise is a promise. Bye. I know that hip is never, ever once break a promise. Certainly not to a whole generation of people. I'll see you soon. So Chapman walked 20 miles in the Florida sun and found not a music festival when he got to the Everglades, but a carnival.

Oh, my gosh. Straight up, just drifting on the street, heard the... Like the movie. Yeah. And he just walked into a carnival and they just gave him a fucking job. And now he walks. Cartoon mouse. What is this life?

That's what he did. Yeah. But the reason why this little adventure is interesting in the journey of Mark David Chapman on the road to the assassination of John Lennon is that this seems to be the first time the Chapman settled into a fictional world. Oh. As I said, 10 weeks with the circus have been one of Chapman's favorite movies growing up. And when Chapman found the carnival, he said it was as if he was living his favorite childhood story.

He had been given the fantasy. So he's living, what was it? Tony Turnbull? What was the name of that guy? Toby Tyler? Toby Tyler. So he's living his Toby Tyler lifestyle. Yeah.

Toby Tyler lifestyle. But he found the reality of running away to join the circus was not elephants and acrobatics, but rather a job guarding carny food from other thieving hippies like himself. Okay. He just had to beat hippies off with the broom. Right. That's literally what his job is. And I like about what's nice about being permanently on acid is that you are just scared by a broom.

You get rid of the six people by going like, shoot, get out of here. They're like, it's cool. It's cool, man. It's cool. And after about a week, Chapman got homesick, borrowed some money from a Cuban named Carlos and got a bus ticket home. Okay. When Chapman...

Well, dude, that was also a check with reality because this Cuban dude picked him up and they were like, okay, so you can stay with us, but you got to work. And he's like, what's work? They're like, we'll fucking show you. And he was like cleaning this restaurant, cleaning the ceilings and shit. And he's like, I don't like this. And they were like, well, we'll do this. We'll either pay you or we'll buy you a bus ticket home.

And he's like, check please. Get me out of here. He was so bad at work, they paid him to leave. Yeah. It wasn't like, at the carnival, it was just like sitting on a fucking pile of corn dogs. Yeah, I get it. But this was full on, like it was restaurant equipment. Oh, yeah.

So this was fucking, this was hard, hard work. Yep. So when Chapman returned, his faith in rock and roll would slowly fade away and be replaced with the faith in God. Oh, great. Nothing can go wrong now. So in 1970, Chapman attended a religious retreat and met a guy named Michael McFarland. Chapman said that McFarland became his quote, first true alter ego.

See, Chapman never, ever had a personality of his own. He was the type of guy who would just reflect the personality of whoever he was talking to, mimicking the speech, the movements, the general disposition, because he had nothing within himself to fall back on. But it's also how many great artists get their start. Many great artists start with impersonating the people they like. Yeah. That's not necessarily, I think that impersonating is actually a way to learn how to be social.

Like in a way, if again, if Chapman had not turned out to be, turned out to be actually very mentally ill, if he had not been, this is the way you fit into society technically is by joining a group that allows, that fosters you with like a social network and help and all that stuff. But when you're a madman. Yeah. And I gotta say, you know, that's why I pride myself on being such an unbelievable individual, individualism.

I'm a unique butterfly. And that's the bottom line because Stone Cold said so. I will open up a can of whoop ass on you at any time. That's just who I am as a person, you know? So whatever, rest in peace, you know, doesn't matter to me. Let's go to work, John Cena. Come on. So Chapman, he was just an empty vessel waiting to be filled and it almost happened at the

age of 16 when Michael McFarland recommended that Mark read a book called Catcher in the Rye. Okay, here it is. Now 16 is supposedly the best age to read Catcher in the Rye. But like my English teacher, she handed me like Vonnegut and Kerouac instead. So I totally missed the whole Catcher boat in high school. I actually didn't even like really hear about it until college after it was too late. So I've never read the book.

Okay. I missed the boat. Did you read it, Ben? Hey, man. I saw the cover and I immediately knew that was not for me. What the heck? It was a bunch of wheat. It wasn't a list of a bunch of banned books at the time.

So I was obsessed with it because I liked anything that was naughty. I liked all my evil shit, my serial killer books because it's like, I knew Catcher in the Rye from Mark David Chapman. And so it's like, I knew that it was the book that was carried to John Lennon's fucking house. So I read it when I was 16. And when you read it, you're like, oh, hell yeah. But then when you reread it, I read it again in college.

And it's just the worst character on the face of the planet. But I think that J.D. Salinger meant to be like that. I think you're supposed to connect to Holden Caulfield's empty, rebellious bullshit that he monologues in in that book. And then when you're older, you're supposed to see, oh, that's just the, his fucking version of the, that's the youth. That's something that I did before and now I'm an adult.

I'm past this. I went, I was very religious growing up. My parents, very religious home pilgrims progress. That was a good book and a lot of goosebumps. I read goosebumps and I read the Hardy Boys and they were fun. But yeah, not the, not the mainstream stuff. Yeah. You would have been a useless member of the Hardy Boys castle.

The Hardy Boys books always sucked because the end would be like, it was their cousin from out of town. We haven't mentioned until the last page. It would drive me absolutely nuts. Now there is a very finite window in which Catcher in the Rye is actually enjoyable and relatable. And Chapman was at that time supposed to be in that window. But at 16, Chapman didn't even have the emotional maturity to understand Catcher in the Rye.

At that time, he was more into the shallowness of drugs and peace and love and most importantly still very much into the Beatles because of all the drugs and peace and love. Let's say the emotions of peace and love are by nature shallow. You could also be very deep emotions. They can't be. They can't be. For our podcast, they're just like, you know, those shallow emotions like peace and love. They shallow things like her.

True consideration of your fellow man. But no, it's like, well, because the hippie movement, it was just very like, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh. But then they left them to sleep in a pipe along. Yeah. Yeah. It was just something that they said. Right, right, right.

Peace and love and all that bullshit. It was just words. It was extremely shallow and ultimately extremely disappointing later on when they completely betrayed those ideals. Of course it was shallow. Dog meat, are you crying? Dog meat, I'm through the Skype. I see one tear coming out of the corner of your eyes.

We were all disappointed. We're all very disappointed and remain disappointed to this day because the boomers are still fucking up our lives. But everything changed with Mark David Chapman, with the whole love and peace and drugs and all that shit when he met Earl, King of the Beach. Fuck that man. That's motherfucking God. That's my religion, dude.

Deep purple, man. You have to get into that shit. It's deeper than red, man. It's deep purple. Where'd you get that necklace, man, from the ocean at Seaweed? King of the Beach did. King of the Beach. But Chapman had taken a vacation to Florida to visit his grandmother and had met Earl

while wandering the beach. Naturally. Because it's Earl, King of the Beach. I got it. He's King of the Beach. That's his kingdom. Yep. So Chapman hung out with Earl and his buddies for most of the day.

But when Chapman got back to his house, he found that either Earl or one of the other guys had stolen his wallet and emptied it clean. Wow. What a fucking goober. What a fucking piece of shit. Well, you literally thought, he thought that all hippies were perfect, that every hippie community you'd walk into would all be, everybody is, it's like socialist lifestyle where everybody shares everything and everybody's equal.

And it's like, no, you just got, you got, you got hoodwinks. Yeah. Peace and love was a lie. I mean, it was, everyone did share everything just unbeknownst to him. And they just stole all of his stuff. The rest of them got it. I mean, I always say, let him know, you know, just let him know if you're going to be taking all the money.

And in discovering all of this shit, like you can kind of see like why, like you can see the beginnings of Mark David Chapman's resentment towards all this piece. And the Beatles, I guess, are the soundtrack to all of this, right? Yes. Yeah. And then Holden Caulfield's childlike idea of life being a divide between innocence and phonies. And he then would put Earl, King of the Beach into the pile of phonies.

And so this was like what he said about this whole thing, which is like, he got, he got grifted. Yeah. Right. But he said, I felt the whole world had collapsed. I felt like nobody, like nothing, nothing at all. It was the culmination of so many things at that time, and I just started crying, just desperately crying.

Sorry. Hey, garbage. Hey, will you say that you feel like, like your wallet empty? Yes. You were robbed. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

That's fun. And I get some of the emotions of this guy's feeling, like I did. Oh, yeah, totally. What a bummer. Yeah. What a super bummer. Like, and because all three of us, we're all very sensitive boys. No.

Not me. No, we're all sensitive guys. So like, I can understand this. I can understand the extreme disappointment of this guy. And you know, it's like what Henry said, I see a lot of myself and Mark David Chapman in this like hypersensitivity shit, but again, like I said, he just took the wrong turn. He took the wrong path and in doing so, lost all sympathy. All right.

So after this, after his encounter with Earl, king of the beach, where else was a disillusioned hippie going to turn to? But Jesus Christ, Chapman shed his former skin as a regular old drug freak and became what was known back then as a Jesus freak. And while we've got nothing against Christians, Jesus freaks are without a doubt the most annoying of the group. It's just they don't, they, they get you with like, you're cool, you're young, I'm cool, I'm young.

Why don't we just go hang out sometime and then they, and then they spin it on you and then you had to sit three hours through became a youth group and you didn't know it was going to be a youth group and then you got to go home and you got to drink alone. I was gotten the same exact way that he was gotten a hot chick from the Jesus group is sent at you. I remember a girl that I was talking to at a party, she was like, you should come check out my church. And the time I was like, whatever you want, I'll go do whatever it is.

I love God and all of Jesus Christ's teachings. And then I showed him. I was like, Oh, it's a Christian cult. They did the same thing to him where he is, he showed up and then all of a sudden, but he loved it because it was community like David Berkowitz and did the same exact shit. You know, you know what I say, you know, there's a lot of Christianity has helped a lot of truckers out there get off the meth and be better family men and all that kind of people do a lot of time and maybe it would, maybe it helped.

It's better that he's not doing drugs with Earl King of the beach. I suppose. If that's the other alternative, hey, whatever, he couldn't end up in the new fog hat cover band, misty shoes. If he had just stayed on that beach after this, either chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, and just hadn't heard about it when it happened or had conveniently ignored it. But suddenly John Lennon's 1966 statement that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus was suddenly the most outrageous offensive thing that Chapman had ever heard.

Wow. All of a sudden imagine was full of blasphemy and only fit for communists and Chapman made sure to bring that up every week at every prayer meeting. He's even singing imagine John Lennon is dead to the tune of imagine. And now wait, I have another one. I have another one. That's really funny. Right.

It's just like, you know, everyone liked my parody last week. Thank you very much. Yeah. There's another one. It's called another one rides the bus. The tune of another one bites the dust. All right. Another one rides the bus.

You remember that? Yeah. I've been scooped. Weird El Yankovich is now on the hit list. However, it does seem like Chapman's hatred of Lennon faded into his subconscious for almost a decade because this was in 1971. This was nine years before the assassination. And that's one of the astounding facts about this story.

Mark David Chapman did not spend years obsessing over John Lennon just like waiting for the perfect moment to strike his enemy down. All that began and ended in the span of about a year, maybe even less than a year. The musician that Chapman was actually obsessed with was the sensitive 70s songwriter, Todd Rungren. Okay. I mean, I like Todd Rungren. Yeah.

I like him. He's fine. He's good. I saw the lights a great song. Yeah. I YouTubed him. Yeah. Runts are a really good album.

Love it. Wolfman Jack's a great song. Yeah. Wolfman Jack. Yeah. It's on Run. Fantastic. Rungren.

Yeah. It's a song that he would take towards Todd Rungren. Todd Rungren's a weird one to get obsessed with. Okay. It's like Todd Rungren is right. And I can see, you know, someone like, man, I love Todd Rungren, but to be a Todd Rungren super fan. Well, I mean, it's just weird.

If you're Todd Rungren, thank God he's a fan. Yeah. But you got to put him to work. Eventually that guy becomes your assistant. Yeah. You need him technically on your team because you're the only one fighting for Todd Rungren. Yeah. They say never.

And you go out there, but he would make everybody listen to Todd Rungren and he keeps saying these are my feelings. Yeah. Yeah. He would like, he's like, when you listen to these songs, these are my feelings. These are the only things that exist, which I understand. Like, but his level of obsession seemed to get immediately very creepy. That's what they say.

Never meet your idols. They might be mean to you. Worst-case scenario, they become your best friend because they are, and you realize, wow, they're just so alone. So alone. A Chapman used to say that listening to Todd Rungren would actually make him depressed sometimes because it was actually depressing to hear music that good, which, you know, he's good.

Yeah, he's good. He's funny. There's someone for everyone. Yeah, there really is. I like that. Yeah, that's great. There really is. I mean, there's someone who, like, Bonnie Raitt makes them cry like a baby.

Bonnie Raitt rocks. Bonnie Raitt's great. She's great. Well, Bonnie Raitt. There's some Kansas out there, man. I mean, who is, I will physically fight both of you to define who is the wayward son. I'm the wayward son. Yeah.

Sure. Sure. Todd Rungren's music Chapman said, quote, I was in my own private world with Todd Rungren. You know, I'm a feeling sensitive, poetic type person and I need my emotions expressed in poetry and in harmony and not in babble. Wow. He's into it. He's really into it.

Cool. All right. Now, what's really interesting is that John Lennon and Todd Rungren actually had a brief feud in 1974 in which Rungren called Lennon a fake revolutionary idiot to which Lennon retorted by calling Rungren both sod, rental, subtle and turd, runt, green. I'm actually giving this to Lennon. I think Lennon wins that technically Rungren's more accurate, but that's that's good humor. That's how you roast him.

But a part of it is that John Lennon has an insufferable, insufferable sense of humor. When you cut to that original, that doc that came out, it was like a filmed concert set in a carnival with Rolling Stones and John Lennon. The music is great. Music's awesome. But the, the bits that they do with him in fucking, what's his name? I'm blanking for some reason on our, the lead, Mick Jagger, Mick Jagger, their sense of humor is very British.

Should they be like, so what do you think, periwinkle sunshine? I don't know, Steve, a winter boat, they would call each other fake things and do these fake little plac-outs and shit, and they should shut up. Yeah, a little British comedy too, and that concert, if you, if you can find, if you, if you want to go out and watch, it's like, what is it called, like the rock and roll circus or something like that? It's fucking great. It's really, really good.

Yeah. It was shelled for like 30 years and then finally released. Oh. But it has the famous scene of Yoko Ono singing behind Chuck Berry and the wintz on his face as she lifts up the microphone and does like, like over their fucking full blues number that they're doing. It's very funny. Oh, wow.

The only thing was, this was all done, this Todd Runger and John Lennon fight. This is all done in interviews and letters in Melody Maker, which was only published in the UK, which Chapman didn't read. Furthermore, Chapman had been a Todd Runger and Superfan for years before this feud even happened. Okay. You know what he says a lot, what you'll see later on. It's a part of maybe his psychosis, but it's a part of it.

He talked about synchronicities more and more as he goes. And there is a lot to be said about that in these cases where he is doing all of these things that just kind of randomly all remind each other and reverberate. So you could as a person that's already some sort of obsessive pathological type, seeing these little coincidences will begin to build an arc into your life that says everything I'm doing has a purpose and I am meant to do other things besides this. Everything has a meaning and I'm the only one who knows. Yeah.

Rungern. Because life is full of synchronicities. It really is. Like if you... And colonoscopies. I'm going to see myself out. I am not going to show forever. He is sick.

Marcos is sick. They both play heavily into my life. I am sick. They're going to be okay. But if you do look for these synchronicities, you will find them, especially if you have an obsessive personality. I have all three of us. See them constantly.

All the time. I know I can see them constantly. Love it. I keep it journal. I just got tickets to a Todd Rungern concert. It's not great to go out. In its weird synchronicities, we are recording this episode two days before Mark David Chapman's birthday.

It's like this weird... And this shit happens all the time with the show where we'll release an episode and then the news will come out. Synchronicities, life is full of them. But the thing is, they don't mean anything. And they only... But not they don't mean anything, but they mean... Why do you mean you're on the right path?

It means as much as you want them to mean. But that's the thing. If you think it means you're on the right path, that path might lead you to killing John Lennon. Well, I don't know. At any rate, in 1972, Chapman found what might well have been his calling, had he been smart enough to recognize what was right in front of him. Because apparently, Chapman was a natural with kids.

He got a job at the YMCA and was so good at working with kids that he got a nickname, a real phone one too. The freak? Captain Nemo. That's awesome. And he naturally called him that. Yeah. And it's a cool nickname.

I worked at the Y when I was in between, it's summers in college and I always took care of the kids that were very overweight. And it was so cute. There's a six year old, he had to be 150 pounds. I did talk to his mother, like she really fed him, like he would come with full pizzas and things. He was a cute kid. I related to him too, you know, it was funny.

But Chapman would twist even this, this whole Captain Nemo thing, into something terrible when he found out that Nemo was the Latin word for nothing. He saw it as another synchronicity. Oh, I'm like kids don't know that. Yeah, they don't know jack shit, but he didn't, yeah, kids don't know that, but he saw it as a synchronicity. He saw it as something that wasn't meant to mean something, but it actually meant something. Especially the way it played out.

Yeah. The YMCA actually provided a lot of opportunities for Chapman and had he taken care of his shit, he could have actually built quite an impressive career there. And this summer of 1975, he was accepted into the agency's international program and was assigned to a summer in Beirut, Lebanon. Oh, whoa. Yeah. Crazy.

For those of you who know modern Middle Eastern history, summer in Beirut in 1975 was not a great place to be. Why they send him with the kids? That's intense. They didn't send him with the kids, they sent him to work with kids in Lebanon. Okay. As an ambassador of the YMCA. That shit used to, they used to send people into war zones quite, quite often back then.

It was different. I am Captain Nemo, I am the ambassador from the YMCA to Lebanon. I mean, that's a powerful position, it sounds like. We got captains, we got sergeants, we got doctors, it's all there. Well, Lebanon's 1975 civil war broke out the day after Chapman arrived, but surprisingly Chapman actually handled it reasonably well. He was scared like anyone else would be, but he still had the wherewithal to make recordings of the exploding rockets and gunfire, just for like posterity.

He didn't have a camera, so I'm going to fucking record this. After being evacuated, Chapman was assigned to work with Vietnam refugees at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, where he shook Gerald Ford's hand. Former President Gerald Ford, then current President Gerald Ford, which Chapman described as quote, greasy. You know, he's used to playing football, throwing the pace skid around with the boys, working on cars. It's hot outside, but also, how many serial killers have we had that have met presidents

now? A lot. So many. John Wayne, Gacy, well, he might just met the first lady, we've got, well, actually meeting presidents, they tend to meet first ladies more. We're talking about like just being around. Yeah, just being around, yeah, being in the general vicinity. Ted Bundy was really involved, truly into politics.

Like he got pretty far up. Yeah. And then if you ever have shaken a president's hand, you've also met a mass murderer, which is kind of exciting. But after all that, everything seemed to go to shit for Mark David Chapman through nobody's fault but his own. Yeah, because at this point again, it seems like, come on, he had it balanced. He had a good life gone.

See, when he was working for the YMCA, Chapman was a somebody. But after the assignment ended at Fort Chaffee, Chapman enrolled at Covenant College in Georgia. And suddenly Chapman was just a student and for a guy who had been told his entire life that he was going to be something great, being a student just like everyone else would just wouldn't do. What's wrong with being a student? You're nobody. But you're not, you're a student.

You do know it. He doesn't understand. He's been so used to having these cartoon adventures. Like he's had like five or six Pinocchio's Pleasure Island bullshit like happen to him. So now he thinks that all life is going to be like that and anything less than that is going, is subpar and he's not living up to his own version of himself being the world's greatest man. I would just, I would enjoy not being in a civil war environment.

I would just like be a student for a couple of years. Relax. Now he tried going back to the YMCA. He was working at one of their summer camps. But after a supervisor snapped at him once, Chapman, like he always did, turned into a bowl of jelly and gave up. Also why he gave up being a super orthodox Christian because he was at a meeting and he said that I was trying to play one of my songs.

I had written a really good song about Jesus Christ because that was the other thing too is that Mark David Chapman was trying to get into music. He was writing his own songs for a while. And so he showed up and now it's time for Mark's song, right? It's time Mark's going to sing, someone introduced Mark, he's going to sing his song and then no one did. And he's like, F this, they don't get, they don't get what it means to be a musician and love Jesus Christ as much as I do.

And then he stopped going to youth groups anymore. And imagine how life would have changed if indeed he was bumped because Todd Rungren showed up and then he was wringing his hands, Rungren, Rungren took my spot. Now this was the paradox of Mark David Chapman. He could handle a war zone well enough, but if you treated him with anything other than the utmost care and sensitivity, it was the end of the world. Now it's obvious at this point the Mark David Chapman suffered from a whole host of mental illnesses, mostly bipolar disorder from the sounds of it.

But even though he knew he had problems, he never truly took responsibility for any of it, which always ends badly. And in his case, refusing to take responsibility for his mental illness, something that was admittedly not his fault, resulted in murder, all because he didn't take care of his shit, which removes any sympathy whatsoever that we might have for a person like him. I have to correct you, Marcus, it resulted in myardere. Also may his mental health awareness month. Oh, okay.

Thank you. Go get checked. Go get checked. I am certainly aware of my mental illness. Yeah. It's like I'm a hostage to it. It's all my myardere. Yeah, it's all like it's something that just rules your entire life, just makes everything

a little colored. Still recording, Marcus, still recording the myardere. Okay. However, before it ended in myardere, it almost ended in suicide. Oh. In 1977, Chapman, believing himself to be a nobody with no way out, figured he was going to go to Hawaii and kill himself. He spent a few days living it up, but after the money ran out, he decided the end had

come. Okay. He spent all his money. He'd done this. He'll do this a couple of times. We'll see. He bought a first class ticket to go to Hawaii. He was like, I went to the most expensive hotel in the fucking main island.

I guess it was called the Moana, which is also a name of a lovely Disney film. Yeah. He went out there. All he did was drink my ties and dance with girls. And he was like, for a second, he's like almost forgot about killing himself. But then he ran out of money and had to stay at the YMCA in Hawaii, which apparently what people say is you get a thing called island fever in Hawaii. I don't really know anything about it, which is essentially the break in reality of I was

just wearing a lay. Everyone was giving me poi and celebrating me and we're all laughing because I have a bunch of money to spend and I'm on vacation. But the week that it ends and now you're just living in Hawaii and it's very difficult to live in Hawaii, you get the sad reality and everything breaks down for you. It's like the end of the movie, Mother. Didn't watch it. All right.

Interesting. Mother. Mother. It's good. Get out of my house. Mother is like, yeah, it's good. It's a good movie. I think you should watch it.

That was not a spoiler. Okay. He bought a length of plastic hose and drove out to an isolated parking lot near the beach. He then attached one end of the hose to the exhaust, ran the other end through his window, turned on the engine and closed his eyes. Like office space. Yes. Okay.

Only thing was Chapman had used a plastic hose so the heat from the exhaust pipe melted the hose and nothing happened. But this was enough for Chapman to realize he did need a little help so he checked into a local mental health facility with acute depressive illness. But the thing was, he didn't actually do anything to truly help himself. He just waited a couple weeks until he swung back up to manic and before long, he'd charmed his way into a job at the mental hospital in the housekeeping and maintenance department. Swear to God, he showed up, right?

Suicidal. Like I have nothing. You got to help me. I'm about to die. They put him in, they gave him drugs, they immediately booked him into a room, they're taking care of him. Two weeks later, he's getting beers with the doctors. He pulls a full, what about Bob, where he is just entertaining everyone and they're

all laughing. There's a woman that he meets, her name's Cindy, who's like, Mark and I were just like two peas in a pod. She was a nurse and his nurse and they became friends and she's like, well, you would do comedy routines together and Mark was just like, he would just my zap to my zip to his up and we were just zip, zap, zapping and everybody and Mark was just a fucking cut up. Even though he just tried to fucking kill himself and no one saw that as a fucking red light

at all. Right. Yeah. Well, I think they just wrote it off as island fever and it's like, well, this just happens. Okay. This happens to people. You know, a lot of guys come to Hawaii and they kill themselves, you know, it's like, well, it's just, it was kind of routine.

So I would assume Las Vegas probably is a similar epidemic. Like leaving Las Vegas. Yes. Like leaving Las Vegas. Nice. So by 1978, Chapman decided he needed to make a change and take a trip around the world after reading around the world in 80 days, once again, mimicking a fictional story because after he got a job at the mental hospital, he stayed in Hawaii.

Like he just, he was just in Honolulu. He lived there. Like he was a citizen. He's so influenced by these books. That's, well, that's his whole thing. That's the whole thing. Everything that somebody, as long as somebody else can tell him how to live his life, he'll follow that.

But while planning this around the world trip, he met a travel agent named Gloria Abe. I think it's Abe. Abe? Because she's Japanese. Ah, makes sense. There it is. Yeah. She was 27, just a few years older than him and the two kept in contact during Chapman's

trip. He went to Bangkok and he went to London, but the whole time, she's fucking slamming the game with her. He's calling her up and seeing me like, what's cooking? Good looking. She'd be like, stop making me laugh. Oh, it's funny. He would show up with flowers and shit.

And so her, from her angles, she was like, I met this cute young smart man and we're falling in love. But then Mark was like, Gloria was okay. You know what I mean? It was kind of like weird that she was like into me. And that was after the fact, when he did full court press trying to seduce her, but then just being like, yeah, it was kind of a thing. And then we got married like it was like a thing, which is a psychopath's behavior.

Reminds me of Ted Bundy. Yeah. Well, he'd had two relationships before that. He got his heart broken when he was like 15 or something, he said he never got over it. And then he was engaged to a girl from his youth group for a little bit, but he broke that off. Also, the one thing we had to skip because of details is because the first time he tried

to kill himself on Hawaii, he called her and he said, listen, I came out here to kill myself. But the only thing that will keep me from doing it is if you let me move back to Atlanta and we get back together. And she was like, oh, no, starting to get wiggity, don't do that to people. Don't threaten. You're going to kill them. So yourself, if the relationship goes right, it's so mean to do to someone. It's the worst thing you can do.

It's a horrible, horrible thing to do. So by the time Mark David Chapman got back from his trip around the world, Gloria had somehow fallen in love with him. They were engaged by 1979 and got married in June of that year. Now, some people make a lot of hay out of how Mark David Chapman ended up marrying a Japanese woman a few years older than him, the same configuration that John Lennon had with his wife, Yoko Ono. What these people fell to recognize is that people of Japanese ancestry are by far the

majority in Hawaii, outnumbering the whites by 13%. Yeah, because it's not like he sought out his own Yoko. This, like so many other things in this story, is just another bizarre coincidence. So it seemed like things were going pretty good for Mark Chapman. But soon after his marriage, his parents got a divorce and his narcissistic mother decided she was going to move to Hawaii to start a new life. Uh-oh, this is a sitcom, but it doesn't end like a sitcom. No, it is a bad sitcom.

This is a bad one. She inserted herself into his life immediately, causing all sorts of problems between Mark and Gloria, once again making Mark her protector and caretaker. Not now, Mom. Not now. I'm trying to make love for one time. I do it once per six months, because I can remember it. When she started sleeping with beach bombs at an alarming rate, she got a divorce, went

down to Hawaii, tormented her son, and boned a bunch of beach bombs, and Mark did not approve of this. He said that the beach bombs only watered his mother, quote, because she has big breasts, you know, and that's all they want. Big front butts, that's what they like, and my mom's got them all big and nice. That's why they're sleeping with her, because they're big, nice, big ones, no front-eye. Something to think about it quite a bit there, Mr. Chapman. Then there were the pressures of Mark's new job.

He'd been appointed as a printer and PR rep for the hospital where he'd previously been a janitor, and pretty soon, someone said something snarky to Mark, which ruined the whole thing. You know what's super creepy is when he was telling that story, he's like, you wouldn't believe it. I started out as a patient here. Yeah, that's completely insane. Can you go back to that? Starting at the bottom now, look where we are.

Yeah, Drake. That's what Drake did. But there was something new in Mark's reaction, whereas before he just collapsed, Mark was now getting angry when the world didn't work the way he thought it was supposed to, because he didn't quit when he was criticized. This time, he had a full-on emotional outburst, which actually got him fired. Very scary. Yes.

He showed how what his rage was like. What you're seeing is that it's building, and it's building and building, and it's just about to pop. Yeah, it's building and building. After that, he got a job as security guard, giving him another tick on the old sociopathic murder checklist. Because it gives you authority. Having a uniform and a gun and a badge is what he wanted so bad.

He wanted everybody to fucking worship him as much as possible, so he would become a piece of shit security guard, which I'm saying is different from a normal security guard, which are normally very helpful. Yeah, they can be. Chapman developed a pretty strong drinking habit and fell further into depression. That is when the little people showed back up. Hey, all right, the little people. No, it's not good, Kessel.

It's not good. It's not good. No, because about a year and a half later, John Lennon would bleed out in the archway of the Dakota in New York City at Mark David Chapman's hand. And that's where we'll pick back up for the conclusion of Mark David Chapman. Yeah, man. We saw him taking it and taking it and taking it. The first half of this series and the second half, we're going to see him giving it.

And we're going to see what he believes he's capable of. And I think it's very scary, and it reminds me again, sort of when we were talking about eurons on side stories about like this thing where it's like he just kind of decided to do this. And there's no real explanation for why he went insane and killed John Lennon. Oh, right. Well, there it is. Mark David Chapman.

A lot of insight into his life. A lot crazier than I expected it to be, honestly. I thought it would be a bit more of a duller. Well, that's kind of what we were doing. We were actually planning on a stalkers who kill episode. We were going to do several like kind of what we did with the manifesto episode where we were going to pick and chase. And so we started with Mark David Chapman and we're like, oh, fuck, this story is incredible.

Like we want to do this whole thing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, thank you all so much for listening. Let's see. What do we have to do? We have a surprise show, but should we talk about that?

The late show is sold out yet. By the time this episode is released, the late show will be sold out. All right. But if you did get tickets, we can't wait to see it on Tuesday in LA. Yeah, can't wait. It'll be a lot of fun. I'll let you know what we're doing. When you guys come in there, you guys are seeing a secret show and we're working out

some new material. Yes. So you're going to see us at our rawest, our most unplugged. If you love us at our Lenin, well, no, you have to love us at our Rungrin if you love us at our Lenin. I don't know if that works. If you don't love me at my Rungrin, then you don't deserve me at my Lenin. Sure.

That works. Sure. Rungrin's great. Or vice versa. If you don't love me at my Lenin, you don't deserve me at my Rungrin. Depending on what your tastes are. Either way, it's going to be a new show. So there's going to be a lot of like, that didn't work, you know, that will happen.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. There's going to be new dates here coming up very soon. Yeah.

And we've also, you know, we're going to be at Clusterfest, we're going to be at Bumbershoot in September. So we've got a couple of festival dates, but our like actual theater dates are going to be announced here as soon as possible. Clusterfest and Bumbershoot, both possible diagnosis for Marcus. We will get the colonoscopy results here coming up in the near future and be sure to share them with you in detail. Just as Marcus really wants.

Yes. Yes. Oh yeah. Open book I am. More than that. Open. That's what I'm saying. Hello.

Asshole. That's what you're saying is asshole. It's asshole. It's fucking open and swollen. You think you have pictures of your swollen asshole? I do. You requested those from the doctor, didn't you? I know.

They just give them to you. They just give them to you. I requested the video of my colonoscopy, but they don't do that. They don't offer that service. I think for another 50 bucks you can have your video narrated by Leonard Nimoy. Yes. Yes. So maybe you should get that up.

RIP. Kissle. Oh, all right. That's right. Man, everyone's dead. After I was already put under under the anesthesia, and I don't remember any of this, I started telling the guys about our live show and explained to them in detail what one for us, one for you actually is and why I wanted a picture of my video of my own asshole to do it.

And then when I was woken up a few minutes later by the orderly, I imagined it was you, Ben, who was yelling at me and shaking me asleep. Very cool. That's my future job. Wake up. Go to sleep. Wake up. You wouldn't believe it.

I used to be a patient. Can you believe it? Get out of here. Stop being my nurse. Thank you for giving to the Patreon and you can continue to do that and no harassing for our sake. We're not going to harass you to do it. No, please not.

But thank you for doing it. Thank you so much for giving to the Patreon. Henry and I have an interview series that it's been a lot of fun and we got a fun interview coming up for you this week or early next week. It should be out. So, yeah, thank you all so much for the Patreon without you. None of this is possible. Of course.

Thank you so much. Follow us on Twitter at Henry Loves, you at Marcus Parks, at Ben Kissel. Follow us on Instagram at Dr. Vendasty, at Marcus Parks, at Ben Kissel, the number one. And follow last podcast and left on all of the things, funneling your money to the corporations that are going to run our lives and are turning us into a new sort of police state at LP on the left. You know what I say? It's not an oligarch.

It's an oligarf. And then you can kind of have fun with the fact that it is. It is cute. Oh, you know. Well, if you think about it as an oligarfield, that's really fun. That is fun. That is cute. That is cute.

My days. Good branding. Good branding. Yeah. Hail Satan. Hail yourselves, everyone. Hail me. Hail game.

Hail me. Goose deletions. Are we just doing everything twice now? I guess so. Hail game. Okay. The goose deletion. I don't.

Hail me. That's the bottom line. Because Stone Cold said so. That's the new closer. That's the bottom line.