Assassination Birthday
We’re Never Going to Find Out What Really Happened. They Made Sure of It.
On my sixteenth birthday, President John F. Kennedy managed to get himself shot in the head, which pretty much ruined not only my sixteenth birthday but every birthday that followed after that. Nobody celebrates my birthday anymore. They are too busy trying to figure out why President Kennedy got himself shot in the head. My question is why he chose that day or any other day to go to Dallas, where nobody liked him anyway. I mean, a “Wanted” poster with Kennedy’s picture on it accusing him of “Treason” was distributed in Dallas just a day before the fateful event. You would think somebody in Kennedy’s security detail would have taken notice of something like that and rolled up the windows or at least bought the guy a hat. But all that is beside the real issue, which is that nobody celebrates my birthday anymore, and that has been the single driving tragedy of my entire life.
My dad had bought me a new used car for my sixteenth birthday and we were supposed to go driving. That was before we got the news out of Dallas. Obviously, no driving. My mom cooked my favorite meal and a cake so we could have a family party that night. Ditto on the ixnay of the birthday drive; we ate a solemn supper in front of the glowing black and white television screen watching Walter Cronkite tear up and all these talking heads talking about what they saw.
I was bummed out by the whole thing, the Kennedy getting shot in the head thing, the no driving in the car thing, the no birthday party with presents thing (I got the presents but nobody said anything; they just handed them to me and I said thanks) and everything else I didn’t get that day, like all the attention I should have gotten on my sixteenth birthday, the most wonderful day of a teenager’s life, and mine had to be on the day Kennedy decided, well alright, I don’t need to say that again. But when anybody asks me now what day my birthday is, you know, usually for astrological reasons or to calculate my age, there is always this kind of stunned, slack-jawed, eye popping thing when I tell them. Was I the only person actually born on that day? Am I the only member of this particular club? Does anybody else even get this?
The whole thing is, I eventually began to not think about my own upcoming birthdays anymore. I no longer cared about my life; I only cared about Kennedy’s death. I have spent my entire life trying to unravel the mystery of what happened in Dallas that day. It has become an overwhelming obsession. I have read every book ever printed on the subject. I am a walking encyclopedia of Warren Commission odd trivia. I am way past grassy knoll theories. I have read three biographies of the umbrella man. I know what Lee Harvey Oswald ate for breakfast that day. I have watched the Zapruder film backwards, transfixed as JFK’s brain explodes a billion times in super slow motion. H.B. McLain was really J. Edgar Hoover in disguise. Jack Ruby was secretly on the payroll of Michael Corleone and the CIA. The three tramps were the Marx Brothers. The “magic bullet” was fired from a Dunkin’ Donuts a block away. J.D. Tippet really shot J.R. I know what was on the missing 18 minutes of Nixon’s Watergate tapes. OJ is innocent.
When my birthday comes around now, I sit alone in my room and reread my autographed copy of Best Evidence, huddled in the middle of my 3D mockup of Dealey Plaza wearing an exact replica of the bloody pink Chanel suit Jackie wore that day, minus the pillbox hat — I’m not that weird. I toll a bell at the exact hour, three times, one for every time Oswald pulled the trigger. I peep out my closed window blinds at the smoking man standing on the street below. I made him years ago, but he still won’t stop watching me. I am afraid. I no longer think it was a conspiracy. I know it was a conspiracy. I have verifiable, authenticated, irrefutable proof of that. I could tell you what it is, but then they would try to kill you — just like they’re trying to kill me.
