I had many, each more ridiculous than the last. The names we gave each other were not merely to make each other laugh but also to illuminate something of who we were, beyond those names given to us by our families at birth, before our personalities were known. The names were supposed to describe the shape of your spirit as well as your physical characteristics. Bono was short for Bono Vox of O’Connell Street, but the boy Guggi was no Latin scholar. “Strong Voice” was an accidental translation. Bonavox was a hearing aid shop in Dublin. He just loved the noise the name made in his mouth. Gradually, Bono Vox of O’Connell Street got shortened to Bonmarie and then to Bono. Previously I had been Steinvich von Heischen, and I was grateful when that phase passed. I called the boy from number 5 Guggi because that’s what his head looked like to me, if you tried to represent it in sound. A sound painting. Say “Guggi” and look at him and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Perhaps.
Hanging in our house is a wall-sized piece of art by the filmmaker Wim Wenders. The Road to Emmaus is a recent photograph of that road, just outside Jerusalem, where close friends of Jesus are said to have walked with him, without knowing it. A couple of days after his crucifixion. There’s a rumor he’s alive and no one can find the body.
His friends are confused, grief-stricken, terrified, and oblivious to the identity of this stranger until the moment when he says goodbye. Now they wake up to the possibility that the very heart of their faith has been beating loudly at their side. If only they’d had eyes to see.
I have taken flights where the person seated next to me, the person I was dodging having a conversation with, turned out to hold a valuable piece of the puzzle of my life that I would be lost without. When you’re open, a hitchhiker—a “randomer,” as my daughter Eve calls them—can become an angel. When you’re least expecting one. And not just people. Places, too, can spark a rare connection that is initially hidden.
We can debate whether information or matter is at the heart of the physical universe, but there is no argument that the essential building block of the rock ’n’ roll solar system is the van. You get nowhere without a van; it’s not just a mode of transport that separates the real from the phony. The van is a time machine, the perfect size for the fledgling rock ’n’ roll community: some musicians, a tour manager, a roadie or two, sometimes a manager. Later it may grow wings and become a private plane, but it will always feel roughly the same size as the van.
In truth something never sat right with us about this “in or out” Christianity or the judgmentalism it came with. This was exacerbated by church people’s attitude toward Adam, who didn’t identify as a believer, who wasn’t part of any faith.
“So you’re not a Christian band then?” such people would ask Adam.
“I’m in a band with Bono,” he’d laugh. “For that alone I deserve an access-all-areas pass through the pearly gates.”
Larry would respond, “I don’t want to be in a fucking Christian band. I want to be in a fucking great band.”
What emerges from pictures of our wedding day is a portrait of two people who couldn’t be further from the rock ’n’ roll culture that was bringing them celebrity. Gauche, naïve, unworldly, and completely unprepared for the challenges of their newly shared life in the world. And yet, conversely, in their raw, unsophisticated idealism, two people ready for less obvious but more dangerous threats. Worldliness, world-weariness, the war of attrition the world wages on a couple as they set out to keep their union. The world licks its lips in anticipation of high-minded failure, doesn’t it? Hubris. “They had it all but they lost it.”
The universe may marvel at such perfectly imperfect love and the stars light your way, but back on earth, if you heed the statistics, it’s as if the world stands in the way of love. I’m sure the essence of romance is defiance, and what is more defiant than two young hearts, twenty-two and twenty-one, deciding to take on the odds, to challenge the dull-thud facts around an ancient ceremony in a modern world.
As I stared a little longer into those veiled eyes, I wondered if Ali was ready to take on the life I’d chosen, even if she was ready to take me “for better or worse.”
We had never lived together, and we were conscious of our own self-consciousness. Is our laughter sometimes a little nervous? We had a lot of baggage and it wasn’t in our suitcases. We spent a lot of every day unpacking each other. We’ve spent our life at the same task. All of us humans weighed down with so much stuff.
“What did you bring this for?” Ali asks, as I stretch this metaphor as far as it will go. “We don’t need this.”
“I didn’t know I had that,” I reply. “Maybe I need to get rid of it.”
Bob Dylan occupied the same space to me in poetry as Yeats or Kavanagh or Keats, but he had two other qualities that had him even higher in my sky: his heavenly inquiries and his earthy sense of humor. In his earliest shows in Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan did Charlie Chaplin impersonations between songs, and there is something of the scallywag about him. Something you can’t not like if you meet it. In the late 1970s he reminded the world that Christianity started out life as a Jewish sect, and he allowed it to be known that he had some vision of Christ that had saved his life. Visions are de rigueur for poets, but humor is not. Bob Dylan has had me laughing out loud at his recordings more than any other artist, and even though I hadn’t got to know him in 1984, to be sleeping on the same grounds that this time-traveling troubadour was about to grace with his songs was a special gift. Such was my excitement that I could hardly speak on the day of the show, which was when a stranger tapped me on the shoulder.
“Can I have your autograph?” asked Bob Dylan.
I now appreciate that that was a very Bob Dylan thing to do, to turn the tables completely. Bumping into Bob Dylan? What’s that like? It’s like bumping into Willie Shakespeare. I knew I was on hallowed ground, if not on solid ground. I was not worthy to tie the laces of his moccasins, but I caught my balance and challenged him to a chess game.
That’s right—a chess game.
With the ONE Campaign, I am pushing Angela Merkel hard on why she won’t promise more German overseas aid. She looks me straight in the eye and quotes her father, a Lutheran pastor from East Berlin: “My father taught me never to appear more than you are and always to be more than you appear.” By the time she has left office, Germany has more than doubled the money it sends abroad to help the poorest.
We wrote the song that we needed to hear.
How I understood that in the end I am one quarter of an artist without Edge, Adam, and Larry. How I am one half of a person without Ali. Exit signs flickering up in the stands, I looked around the stage at my co-dependents and noticed my own gratitude. We’re one and for a split second we’re the same.
That’s been Adam’s steep climb to recovery, his personal regeneration, for three decades. I’ve never been to AA, but I get a sense of the spirituality of the 12 Steps in the idea of “breathing underwater,” a phrase I heard from the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr. Taking responsibility for yourself is one of the most important steps, along with surrendering to your higher power.
Adam surrendered to his higher power. He’d never been a religious person, he’d opted out of Shalom when the rest of us were in its thrall, and he was annoyed by our Christianity. But he ended up on his knees with the three of us, looking to save himself from himself.
Looking for help from something bigger than himself.
It’s an extraordinary thing, the moment of surrender. To get down on your knees and ask the silence to save you, to reveal itself to you.
To kneel down, to implore, to throw yourself out into space, to quietly whisper or roar your insignificance. To fall prostrate and ask to be carried.
To humble yourself with your family, your bandmates, and to discover if there’s a face or a name to that silence.
In the years since, I have often regretted that we didn’t stop to think a little more carefully about what right we had to take on this work, to barge our way into the corridors of power. We took it for granted that because the problems of global inequality were mostly created by the Northern Hemisphere, it fell to those of us in the north to solve them. I recognize now how arrogant this position was. I learned a little late the wisdom in a Senegalese proverb, “If you want to cut a man’s hair, be sure he is in the room.”
But as the days passed, I began to observe something paradoxical but also encouraging. If the perspective of Secretary O’Neill and his team of monetary theorists was being changed by the stories of heartbreak that the AIDS pandemic placed in our path, my perspective was also shifting as I began to see the role of domestic industry and commerce, and especially infrastructure, in bringing people out of extreme poverty.
While I started paying more attention to the kind of economic data that lets you know what’s really behind the poverty of a country, Paul and his wife, Nancy, along with Julie, their daughter, ended up spending longer than planned talking to nurses, doctors, and patients in clinics and hospitals.
I can still recall how shocked they were, visiting a clinic in Soweto, to discover that while the United States funded the drug nevirapine for pregnant mothers to prevent them from passing HIV to their unborn children, there was no funding for ARVs (antiretroviral drugs) to save the life of the mother herself. If I wasn’t in tears, the O’Neills were. We were all changing.
