Oh my God! This can't be true. I was a big John Belushi fan. I loved SNL. We did the Samurai in drama class. Other kids had Rock Stars on their walls. I had a picture of the "Not Ready for Primetime Players." I wanted to grow up and be a "Not Ready for Primetime Player."
The next morning I read in the San Juan Star that he died at the Chateau Marmont and there was this mystery woman that showed up in his rental car. The following Monday at school, a classmate said, " I bet it was drugs." I said, "No way it wasn't drugs. He, he was... just fat. He was fat and he had a heart attack.” The teacher stepped in saying, "Yeah, you’re probably right Tony, he was just fat."
A few days later I saw pictures from the funeral in The San Juan Star. It was heartbreaking to see Bill Murray placing a rose on the coffin and see Dan Akroyd and Jim Belushi as pallbearers. That night it was announced on CNN that John Belushi died of a mixture of heroin and cocaine, commonly known as a speedball. I felt horrible. I had just defended the guy. I couldn’t understand why this happened. I knew he’d done drugs; they all did drugs.
The next day I found an editorial cartoon that featured two grim reapers dressed as the "Blues Brothers.” On the arm of one of them was Heroin and on arm of the other was Cocaine. I thought this was in really bad taste. I showed it to my Dad who always let me know whenever I did something in bad taste.
To my surprise, he told me that he agreed with the cartoon. “But it’s too soon to joke about someone who just died,” I said. He responded with, “No you have to strike while the irons hot.” I felt that they should show some respect for the dead and some sympathy for the family. “Not this time,” he told me, “there are a lot of kids your age who see that he was funny and he took drugs so if I take drugs I can be funny, too.”
My first thought was that that’s stupid; he was funny because he was funny, not because of the drugs. He didn’t need drugs to be funny and my dad said, “Lots of kids don’t see it that logically.” We talked for a while longer and my dad ended the conversation with, well I guess we think differently on this subject.
There are two things you need to understand about my relationship with my Dad back then. When we talked, it was usually about me doing better in school and our conversations never ended with us agreeing to disagree. Over the next year, if there was ever a conversation about someone having it all and throwing it away, my Dad would segue the conversation to “just like John Belushi.” I really thought my Dad was afraid that I would follow in Belushi’s footsteps.
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