Killing Bono Read Free Page A

Bono—was fourteen when his mother died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in September 1974. He grew up, with his older brother, Norman, and father, Bob, in a household of men numbed by grief, unable to share their feelings. It is something we have talked about over the years. “You don’t become a rock star unless you’ve got a lot missing somewhere—that’s becoming increasingly obvious to me,” Bono once admitted during another rambling call down a transatlantic phone line in the middle of a U.S. stadium tour. “If you were of sound mind you wouldn’t need seventy thousand people a night telling you they loved you to feel normal. It’s sad, really. It’s the God-shaped hole. Everyone’s got one but some are blacker and wider than others. When you’ve been abandoned, when someone’s been taken away from you, when you feel like a motherless child, the hole opens up. I don’t think you ever fill it. You can try to fill it up with time, by living a full life, but when things are silent you can still hear the hissing.”
    For Bono, the opening up of the God-shaped hole was the defining moment in his life, pushing him in two directions simultaneously: toward the emotional sanctuary of rock ’n’ roll and toward the salvation promised by a profound faith in his maker. If I had anything resembling a God-shaped hole, I think it would have been God (Him, Her or Itself) that was missing.
    I was raised as a churchgoing Catholic boy, and my gradual estrangement from the comforts of faith was a long and torturously painful process (as much, I suspect, for those around me as it was for myself). At seven years old, I served a brief tenure as an altar boy in the local church. For me, the altar was a stage, the worshippers merely a captive audience, but my scene-stealing posturing during service did not go down well with the priest, who quietly took me aside after a particularly melodramatic dispensation of the Holy Host and suggested that I might not be cut out for the job. (As it turned out, neither was he: some months later he eloped with a member of the congregation.)
    My faith was to be seriously tested by our move to Ireland—still a rigidly Catholic country, with little separation between Church and State. At the tender age of ten, I fell into the grip of the Christian Brothers, an order of repressed sadists who operated a policy of beating the fear of God into you. Violence was deemed a healthy way for boys to occupy their time. Certainly, the pupils in St. Fintan’s Primary School did little else but fight, usually under the approving supervision of their teachers. At breaktimes the playground was a seething mass of young bodies gripped in a variety of wrestling positions. I think I spent most of that first year in a headlock.
    With spirits low, my parents made the decision to remove all their children from the clutches of the various religious orders (Stella was being educated by nuns up the road) and install us in a private school of excessively liberal inclinations. In its own way, this proved every bit as ill judged. Sutton Park was full of rich kids whom no one could discipline for fear that their parents would withdraw their fees. Needless to say, I loved it.
    There was no religious education in my new school. Acts of worship were reserved for music appreciation classes, to which pupils were encouraged to bring in their own records. Our teacher would play us a piece of Mahler, which we would listen to in bored silence, and then it would be the turn of someone in class to get up and stick on an Alice Cooper or Mott the Hoople record, every aspect of which would be furiously debated while the teacher rolled his eyes in despair.
    When it came to my turn to bring in a record, I did not exactly have a lot of choice. I only owned one single, Terry Jacks’ number-one hit “Seasons in the Sun.” It remains a source of embarrassment to me that the