The summer of 1981 was idyllic. It was just an extraordinarily good time because Aykroyd managed to talk Belushi out of going to Europe in August. Belushi was restless; but this was the worst, hottest month to go abroad, Aykroyd kept telling him. "Nobody's in Paris anyway. What's there to see? Half the place is shut down. You're here. You've got the best house on this beautiful beach. You're not going to find a spot in the world that's going to assuage you and take care of you in a spiritual, physical, and mental sense. There's just no way. Europe would just wear you out." Belushi just hemmed and hawed, and finally stayed.
It was just a little bit of heaven. They fished and swam, and they surfed at six every evening, like a pair of California beach boys--Aykroyd even had the platinum blond surfer-boy hair (it had been dyed for the filming of their last two-guy movie, Neighbors). They loved the seclusion of their beach, which they called Skull Beach. Any one of their friends who wanted to come down to the beach had to present a skull insignia to the police guard at the road. Aykroyd wore a headband with skull and crossbones all summer. Even the guard wore skull and crossbones.
In preparation for "The Crunch Three," an annual demolition derby for year-round islanders which takes place on an oval track near the Gay Head cliffs after the summer season is over, they began fixing up the X-13, the original Blues Mobile. They put a heater on the back of the car (to make it resemble a rocket engine), and painted on red triangles and jet-fighter stencil graphics--NO STEP, RESCUE, EXIT--and, of course, a large skull-and-crossbones death's head. "We did this as a celebration to John," remembers Aykroyd, "as a celebration of death and death-defying stunts and jet pilots and all of that mystique--which is a heavy premonitory irony."
In the summer afternoons, after being out on the water with his friend Walter, a lobsterman, Aykroyd would come back to his multiview home where he would find Belushi napping on the couch in his living room. Aykroyd covered him up and let him sleep. It was, in Aykroyd's words, "a ritual": Whenever Belushi ws crashed out, Aykroyd would put a blanket over him. ("I loved to see him sleep. I knew he couldn't get into trouble. I knew he was in peace when he was asleep.") Aykroyd would watch Belushi's slumbering form, listen to to his breathing--the heavy rise and fall of three-packs-a-day--and feel a momentary sense of ease himself. At times like these, the turbulence of the business, the janged, overhead, cocaine pulse of Hollywood at night, seemed far away. This summer, John was clean.
Sometimes, they walked along Skull Beach and talked about growing old together, about what their lives would be like. It was going to be great: Even if they weren't working together when they were sixty, they would see each other. Sure, listen: Danny would be up on his farm in Canada, a crochety old hermit with a shotgun ("Who in tarnation is comin' up the way now?") and John would be his portly, gray American friend, and they would go fishing like the old men from Jersey who drive up to Canada every year, and they would sit around the lodge, farting and geezing together. And there would be time for all the things they were too busy for now.
Then, other times, Dan and John wondered if they would even make it to forty. They knew they were living fast. They talked about early departures. According to Aykroyd, "There was this Ring Lardner thing that we enjoyed bantering around--live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse. We knew, man. Listen, if I make it to forty, I'll be really thankful. But I certainly don't expect to. I'd like to see forty. John would have, too. But then again, there was this little favorite thing of ours--live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse--grab it all now. That's the left hand's thinking. The right hand's thinking is to do right by your life, to fulfill and accomplish yourself. If Aykroyd tended to be right-handed, even when he gripped the handlebars of his motorcycle going 80 mpg, Belushi was now clearly ambidextrous.
One late-summer afternoon when the island was beginning to smell of September, they were driving around in Danny's jeep, listening to tapes. Danny put on an instrumental tune by the Ventures. It was called "The Two-Thousand Pound Bee." It was full of such bad, buzzing electric-guitar bee-sounds that it was fantastic. They both loved it. "Man," said Danny, "wouldn't it be great when we died to force this song on a church full of people--so loud it'd hurt?" They laughed and thought about it for awhile--"The Two-Thousand Pound Bee" hovering over all those mourners. It'd be a great, monstrous joke.
Then Danny said, "Listen John, if I die first, man, you've got to promise to play this at my eulogy or my funeral."
John pledged that he would, and they made a pact as they drove around in the last amber light of that summer day: Whichever one of them died first, the other would play "The Two-Thousand Pound Bee" at the funeral.
On Friday, March 5, 1982, Aykroyd was alone in his office at Phantom-Black Rhino in New York. He was writing a script called Ghostbusters (in which he and Belushi were to play "paranormal technicians" who exterminate ghosts and spirit entitites from suburban homes). Along with Spies Like Us, Never Say Mountie and Moon Over Miami, it was one of several two-guy projects that were schedules for production. Aykroyd was mid-sentence, writing a line of dialogue for Belushi, when the phone rang. Bernie Brillstein was calling from Los Angeles. John was dead.
Six seconds passed before it sank in. "Well, how did it happen?" was Aykroyd's first question.
"He died in his sleep this morning."
"Drugs?"
"They don't know at this point," Brillstein replied. "It was respiratory."
Another pause came in.
"What are we going to do?" said Brillstein.
Aykroyd took charge. He felt himself going into his "pragmatic robot mode: Don't think now...Gotta give the man a decent burial. I'm gonna do my part." There were arrangements to be made. But he couldn't help thinking how it all could have been reversed. John could have gotten the call about him being killed on the highway in a motorcycle crash. He wondered how John would have reacted, and what John would want him to do now: "Carry on...Be a little robotic about it."
He remembered the last time he had seen John--just the week before, at the Blues Bar. John had not been in the best of shape; he looked tired, exhausted. Danny begged him: "Don't go back to L.A. Let's go to the Vineyard."
"But John had to get out there," Aykroyd recalls. "had to solve something, had to have that excitement--those dwindling dawn hours at Sunset Strip." Then the phone calls through the week, the navy cruise plan, the tight jangled voice, the talks with Judy about going out and bringing him home if he didn't come back East by Thursday night...then the coroner's report, saying that he'd died of heroine and cocaine. "Intravenous injections?" Aykroyd thought. "The man hated even getting his finger pricked for a blood test--"
"I think if I had it to do over again," Aykroyd would say later, "I would have taken two or three of my friends and handcuffed him and put him in an institution just to turn him around, clean him up. It was mainly the cocaine he was interested in, like everybody else. He had the money to do it. He just fell in with some bad people. I'm not saying that he didn't ask to be hit up, but I don't think he could have hit himself up--he was not that good a mechanic. The last days were pretty sad, but if I'd cuffed him, that would have broken his heart: his best friend taking him and putting him in an institution."
Now Aykroyd had to put him in the ground. Up on the Vineyard he was handling all funeral arrangements, and comforting John's parents and Judy. He made sure that no fewer than three state police cars were there on the tarmac when John's body was flown in on a stretcher on a Lear jet. John was wearing the clothes he normally wore. This was the way he would have come home to the Vineyard anyway--in a private jet. When the body was taken to Sylvia's Funeral Home in Vineyard Haven, Ayrkoyd finished planning security logistics for the following day. This was going to be, in Aykroyd's view, " a funeral fit for a goddamn Head of State."
That morning, Aykroyd dressed himself in motorcycle boots, blue jeans, and, in honor of John's (and Jake's) hometown, a Chicago police scooter jacket with the city's flag patch sewn on the right shoulder. He wore a carnation in a buttonhole. Wrapped around his neck like a scarf was a Confederate flag ("'cause John was a rebel"). With the hearse, the Blues Mobile, and the family cars behind him, Aykroyd let the cortege to the West Tisbury Congregational Church. On his motorcycle, he gunned the engine, making as much noise as possible--just in case John's soul could hear it. The churchyard was like a carnival midway, crawling with gawkers and cameramen and reporters. Two helicopters whirred around overhead. Aykroyd thought: Oh boy. Adding to this spectacle, the guys in the Blues Mobile suddenly jumped out and began watering a pine tree in the churchyard; they'd been drinking, and din't want to get stuck in the church service with a full bladder. Meantime, the helicopters were circling like buzzards, and the cameras were clicking like a swarm of locusts, recording this unholy micturition for posterity, and the guys were waving, and who knew how many cartwheels John's soul was turning.
During the service, which was presided over by a priest from Boston's Holy Trinity Albanian Orthodox Church, Aykroyd was thinking he really did not want to be here at all. He was sitting in the back, wondering whether John would have been here if this were his (Danny's) funeral. ("I knew that he wouldn't have sat through a church service like that.") It went on for almost an hour. Aykroyd tried to bolt, but reconsidered when he discovered that the back door was, in fact, the front door, through which was waiting a swarm of photographers. He sat it out and was glad, after all. It was, he thought, a beautiful service. By the end, he was weeping.
In Abel's Hill Cemetery, snow fell during the burial. Family and friends crowded around the grave, and James Taylor sang "That Lonesome Road." Everyone wept as the solid oak coffin ws lowered into the ground. Aykroyd remembered that John had once talked about having a Viking funeral on Skull Beach; he'd wanted his body set on a pyre heaped with boughs and set aflame and floated out to sea..."Well, that would have been a circus," Aykroyd was thinking. "There would have been a flotilla of press boats, and what if the fire had gone out too soon, and ...Forget that." Aykroyd didn't feel to bad about not fulfilling John's wish for the Viking funeral on the beach. But he found himself telling John what was going on here, murmering in a low voice: "Now John, just relax now. The Viking funeral is out. Just relax. We're putting you here in Abel's Hill with the whalers and the Indians and the pirates and the smugglers. You'll be fine. There are so many ghosts on this island. Good bones here, man. You're gonna be with good bones..."
Three days later, Aykroyd stepped up to a microphone in the pulpit of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. He took from his blue knapsack a cassette tape recorder, turned its speaker to the pulpit microphone, and pressed the play button. The large crowd that had gathered in the chancel for John Belushi's memorial service sat stunned, then rocking with laughter as "The Two-Thousand Pound Bee" suddenly soared upward, buzzing into somber places where no tribute of this kind had ever gone before.
Two months after the service, New York City makes Aykroyd restless. He wants to go up to the Vineyard, to see what's doing at John's grave. "I think about him every morning when I get up, and I just sigh," says Aykroyd, his eyes still glistening with tears from a momentary surge of grief brought on by remembering John's devotion to Dan's brother, Peter. "That's the first time I've cried since the grave and the funeral. See, there's a lot of grief there, a lot of grief, 'cause it's your best friend. I don't weep for the tragedy...I cry because I miss him."
Aykroyd says he just has to accept the fact that John's bones are lying nearby. He often muses about going up to John's grave and eating some chickens and drinking some beer to commemorate the dozens of chickens and beers they used to polish off together. So he'll bring a six pack and eat those chickens and spend a little time with the whalers, the Indians, the pirates, the smugglers, and John.
Even now, whenever Danny Aykroyd drives by that graveyard, he always honks his car horn--long and loud--on the good chance that somewhere, in some form, John can hear it.