by John Lurie
At one point, in Texas, government agents got on the bus to inspect all of the Mexicans’ IDs. They were really rude to the Mexicans, and the German, giving them a hard time, asked why they hadn’t asked for his ID. A couple hours earlier he had threatened and pushed this big Texan who was trying to take one of the Mexicans’ seats, so I thought he might really get into it with these agents, but he didn’t. Because he had seemed so scuzzy, I was surprised to see him stand up for somebody and was kind of proud of him.
We got to San Diego, and the restaurant guy made us his special sandwich. I have no idea what was in this sandwich, can’t remember, but I can still somehow invoke the taste of it.
It became clear that this was some kind of weird sexual deal between the two of them. I guess the groovy restaurant guy supported him in return for sexual favors. It felt creepy and I left the next day. I hitched up to San Francisco. I heard that there were friends of mine hanging out there in Berkeley. It was all happening on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.
Berkeley didn’t do me much good. It was over. What was left was mostly hippie burnouts, at least on the street. Air filled with the smell of burning, rotted synapses.
We’d found out after my father died that we had a half sister, Ella. She had a family and lived in San Jose. I stayed with them for a while, but it was very awkward. I was grieving my father and she resented him deeply. He’d left before she was born, and she was certainly entitled to this feeling, but I couldn’t cope with it. It was eerie because she looked just like my dad.
I got introduced to a houseful of people living in Berkeley. They were older, sort of ex-hippies. They were intelligent and organized. They tried to guide me along, but I was so dark that they mostly kept their distance.
I had a mad crush on this woman who was with the second-oldest brother in the household. He was respected and they, as a couple, held a position of honor.
People were constantly coming and going. They had a sort of open door policy and tried to be tolerant of all the wayward misfits that they allowed to crash there.
There was this blond guy who stayed for a few days and kept telling the same story about how he had whipped his dick out at a police officer. He told it over and over. The woman I liked, Jane, said to him, “Next time I see a policeman, I’m going to whip my cunt out at him.” That shut him up. And deeply amplified my crush.
I decided to hitchhike down to L.A. The guy who picked me up was going all the way. When we got close to Big Sur, he pulled out a joint and we got very high. He started swerving his van really fast through the cliffs, with the sea smashing against the rocks hundreds of yards below.
We got to L.A. and stayed at a flophouse filled with miscreants. The guy who brought me there was cool, but these other people I could have done without. We smoked some more of his very strong pot.
I was having trouble smoking marijuana at this time. I had adored getting high before, especially when playing music, and thought that it was essential to my development and understanding, but now it was driving me mad. Every time I smoked, I felt ugly and small. I kept smoking it and trying not to go to this hideous place, but it happened over and over.
I decided to smoke a lot with this guy and see what I found. I brought a notebook back to my cot and started writing. This way in the morning I would have something I could learn from, from when I was high. When I got up in the morning, the notebook read: hoooufhd thiee b—then just a bunch of squiggly lines.
The guy with the van had left. I got my knapsack and went outside. I walked for a while and found a diner. I had ham and eggs and then had only about $20 left.
There is nothing to walk to in L.A. There is nothing to find and no people to meet. At least not that I came across. I walked around from morning until it started to get dark without seeing the slightest sign of refuge or kindness. I bought an Arby’s roast beef with change and thought that one day I would have enough for two Arby’s roast beefs, and then things would be better.
On Sunset Boulevard I found a free paper. There was a number listed for kids stuck without a place to sleep, so I called it. They gave me another number and I called that.
The guy who came to the phone sounded nice. I told him where I was and he came and picked me up about forty-five minutes later. He stopped at Jack in the Box; it was a drive-thru. I’d never been to a Jack in the Box before.
We go back to his place and there are photos everywhere of the young and old Jay North. Jay North is, or was, Dennis the Menace from the TV show. This guy was his manager, and he was trying to help the career of the now-thirty-year-old Jay North, with little or no success. It gave me my first glimpse into the desperate world of show business.
He offered me a massage. I let him rub my neck and then told him I had to go to sleep. I lay there on the couch for hours pretending to sleep. The next morning I left him a note saying he was very kind and hitched back up to San Francisco.
I stayed in San Francisco for another few months, a pretty uncomfortable time for me. I wasn’t getting any closer to making a breakthrough and decided to go back to Massachusetts.
I got a ride from a couple with a van. I found them off a bulletin board. These people were the original yuppies. They dressed in all the correct hippie garb, were super clean, and looked like they each did their hair with a hundred brushstrokes every day. They charged each person they took and made a profit on their trip back east. I couldn’t stand them.
I was staring out the window as we drove through flat Oklahoma. Lost, rigid, and unhappy. I said to myself, “If there is a God, let me see a red light in the sky as a sign.” Two seconds later we drove under a giant radio tower with a red flashing light, thousands of feet off the ground. Does that count?
Among the passengers was Charlotte, a very sweet, very plain hippie chick. We started making jokes at the expense of the Hair Brushers.
The van broke down in Tennessee. We were pushing it and I just stopped helping. Now, after laying down all these rules about their van and dictating when we would stop and when we would eat, the original yuppies were putting forth this attitude like, Come on! We’re all in this together!
It just didn’t seem like I should have to push their stupid van when they were charging me more than Amtrak. And we clearly were not all in this together.
The guy couldn’t turn his neck. To look around, he had to swing his whole torso. This added to his general demeanor of uptightness. He and his wife were fifteen feet ahead of me, pushing the van. When he realized I was not helping, he did his little mannequin move, swung his whole body around to glance back at me in disapproval.
We got to a gas station and there was a guy in army fatigues going north, so Charlotte and I took our stuff out of the back of the van and split with him. The guy turned out to be a psychopath. He had just gotten back from Vietnam and would rave, while he drove, that he was having recurring dreams where he died: “Holding my guts in my hands! You’re not supposed to die in your dreams! You almost die and then wake up! You’re not supposed to die!”
We stopped at a motel, the three of us in one room with two beds. It was decided that I’d share the bed with Charlotte.
I took my first shower in four days. I came out of the shower naked. People in the house in Berkeley were always walking around naked, so this is how it’s done.
This didn’t sit very well with Vietnam Vet Psycho. When we were leaving the next morning, Charlotte took me aside just outside the motel room.
“He was going to kill you when you were sleeping.”
“What?!”
“He has a big hunting knife and he wanted to cut your throat. He didn’t like that you came out of the bathroom naked.”
“That’s crazy!”
“He thought it was disrespectful to me.”
“How? Do you think that? I didn’t mean to be disrespectful to you.”
“No, of cour
se not. It’s perfectly natural and I kind of enjoyed it, but I had to stay awake for hours begging him not to hurt you.”
“Oh, great.”
“I think it will be okay.”
So for the rest of the trip, I only pretended to sleep. I heard him saying to her in the front seat, “There’s a group that I think you would like. They’re a brother and sister team called the Carpenters. They’re very unaffected.”
As we drove north, it was beginning to snow. Psycho Vet told me to throw my shoes out the window. I was wearing sneakers that were falling apart.
“Why?”
“Just throw them out the window.”
I didn’t really want to get murdered without my shoes on, but the guy was demanding that I do it in a really threatening way. I threw my sneakers out the window as we sped along the highway. He reached down into a bag at his feet and pulled out a relatively new pair of army boots that did me quite nicely.
When I got back to Worcester, I called my mom from the neighbor’s phone, pretending to still be in Berkeley. I asked her to hold on for a second and snuck in the front door. I said, “Hi, Mom,” from behind her.
When she realized that I was standing behind her, her glasses came flying off her head as she rushed toward me.
3
Inside God’s Brain
At four a.m. on Main Street, in Worcester, Massachusetts, the universe gave me my first saxophone. There was hardly any pretense or shrouding it in the mundane. It wasn’t this happened and then that happened and I turned that way and there it was. Just a man with a wheelbarrow gave me my first saxophone.
My sister, Liz, had given Evan a harmonica for his fifteenth birthday. I had taken it and become obsessed. I played all the time and was getting good really fast. I had heard the better known harmonica players in Worcester and in Boston and I knew that I was faring pretty well.
The drummer Michael Avery was my sister’s boyfriend. I looked up to Michael. He taught me a lot about music, just by playing me stuff when I would go to visit them in Boston. He was the first person to play me Coltrane. I didn’t understand it and was fascinated by the idea that there was music that I didn’t understand.
It was like hearing someone speak Chinese. How could there be this music that I didn’t understand?
* * *
—
Michael came to Worcester to play at a dive called the Ale ’n’ Bun. Evan and I had been at the Ale ’n’ Bun a few months before when this giant guy was acting like a complete asshole. The bouncers tried to throw him out but couldn’t. The police arrived and the giant picked up a barstool and heaved it at the wall of bottles and mirror behind the bar.
Only a couple of bottles broke.
Evan turned to me and said, “I was disappointed at how little damage that did,” as the police dragged the guy out.
Michael was there playing with Babe Pino, a harmonica player from Boston. Babe Pino had a reputation as being the best harmonica player in the area, which, to me, was bullshit. It was solely based on the fact that he had lived on Maxwell Street in Chicago, which, at one time, a long time ago, had been the hotbed of blues in this country. He had a few fancy licks that he played but didn’t have any heart or imagination in his playing. He wore shiny clothes, had ugly hair, and I couldn’t stand him.
On guitar was a misshapen white guy who had played with Muddy Waters. Muddy had named him Guitar Goony.
I ask Michael if I can sit in, and he says he’ll ask but doesn’t seem thrilled about the idea. It’s Babe Pino’s gig, and Babe Pino is a harmonica player. Halfway through the show they call me up. Babe is not friendly. He hands me a mic—not his prized bullet mic, which is made for the harmonica, but some cheesy thing. He says he’s going to sing and I can play harmonica. I’m nervous, but I know that I’m good.
They start, and I join in but I can’t hear myself. I can’t hear a note I’m playing and I feel uncomfortable. This is not going as I imagined, where they would play and I’d come in behind them and, “Wow! The kid is good!”
I can’t hear myself. I have no idea what I am playing. I start playing so hard that I can basically only play one note at a time, one note per breath. It’s a disaster. I’m horrible. I feel that hot prickly sensation on my back and neck, that thousand mosquito bite feeling that accompanies making a complete asshole out of yourself. But what has happened is that my mic is not in the monitors, there was no way I could have heard myself. I didn’t know anything about monitors at that time. (Monitors are the speakers that face back toward the musicians onstage, allowing them to hear what they are playing.) I don’t know why I can’t hear myself and I’m thinking that Babe Pino must be some kind of a monster to be able to be heard. I don’t have the power that it takes. I’m playing harder and harder, to the point where nothing I play makes any musical sense.
I can see their derisive glances. Who is this jerk kid who thought that he could compare to the great Babe Pino? Even Michael is snide afterward.
* * *
—
I’m walking. Late that night. I’m inconsolable, my depression has been verified because I stink. Vietnam is looming, my dad is dead, and now it turns out that I am not the great talent that I thought I was. In fact, I’m a fraud. Nothing. I really am nothing.
I’m walking and just staring at the pavement. I’m not even hoping for an encounter with a frustrated housewife, as I used to do.
At about four a.m. I find myself alongside a guy casually pushing a wheelbarrow down Main Street, near Clark University. This is odd because nobody is out at this hour and he has a wheelbarrow.
I ask him what he’s doing and he tells me that he is going to plant an organic garden on the roof of his apartment building. He also says that he’s just seen a statue turn into an angel and fly off. He says it in such a way that it sounds like something he suggests I do if I ever get around to it. He’s very odd and very gentle, he’s black and a little on the plump side. He is that kind of person who has no actual awareness that he is in a physical body.
I find him fascinating.
He explains to me that it’s possible to make amplifiers out of cotton. That it has a higher vibration. This man may be crazy, and I knew then, as I know now, that it is not possible to make amplifiers out of cotton, yet he is so warm and so human and he isn’t crazy, he’s just something else, and he’s just mistaken about making amplifiers out of cotton.
I walk him to his mother’s house to help him with the wheelbarrow full of dirt. We have to be quiet, his mother is asleep. There is an enema bag hanging on the back of the bathroom door. I wonder what this object is.
I wait by the door while he goes deeper into the apartment and comes out with a tenor sax. He’s going to lend it to me and I can bring it back when I’m done with it.
He also lends me his bicycle so I can get home. Just like that. He doesn’t know me, I’ve hardly said a word, and he gives a complete stranger who he’s met at four in the morning a horn and a bike. This is not usual.
I can’t remember his name. I’ve been trying for years to remember his name. I think it was James Washington. I only met him twice, and a third time I saw him from a car as he was walking down a side street in Worcester, one foot on the curb, the other in the gutter, like a kid, shirttail hanging out. The other people in the car knew him and laughed when they saw him ambling down the street. He was clearly not of this world. The reason that I am not sure that his name was James Washington is that later there was a man named James Parker Washington, who also seemed to drop out of the sky for a visit, who helped me when I was lost. He set me up with a job and apartment in Brooklyn, which was how I first got to New York. So I am not sure if I somehow later imagined the man with the wheelbarrow to be named James Washington or if they were both named James Washington, which then would make it certain that they were not people at all.
There are moments when some f
orce in life parts the clouds and says, “Hi, it’s me, God. I was hiding, but now I’m back. Here’s a little something to nudge you in the right direction.”
So now I have this tenor. I’m not going to study other saxophone players. On harmonica I had listened furiously to Little Walter, who is an absolute genius. His big scarred head staring out from the album cover. On guitar I had studied Hendrix so deeply that it may have been impossible to ever find my own sound. On the horn I was going to start from scratch. I wasn’t even going to buy a finger chart to learn which notes were which.
* * *
—
There is a place in Worcester called Newton Hill, which is a wooded area. It’s near Newton Square and Doherty High School, and at the bottom of the hill are basketball courts where we used to play. Newton Hill is centrally located yet isolated, so at night I would take my borrowed horn and go up into the woods and blow my brains out.
Nothing made musical sense, as I didn’t know what the notes were. This was complete unadulterated energy. I played until the night darkened trees spun around me in a warm, inviting way.
One night, I was up there at about three in the morning. I used to play in a clearing at the top of the hill. Blowing as hard as I could, for as long as I could, with my eyes closed in the woods. I’m on the hill and I’m playing and I notice that the ground is trembling. I stop playing, something weird is happening. I hear engines, and the sound is coming closer, which is really strange because I’m in the woods at the top of a hill and it’s three in the morning. I grab my case and back off into the brush.
I see five or six motorcycle cops on their bikes come blazing into the clearing. They are all yelling, like, “Yahoo!” kind of shit. One of them has his gun out and fires it into the air. Do they think that bullets just disappear into the atmosphere when you fire a gun into the air? They are riding around in a circle like madmen.
