The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  I hide and wait for them to leave. They are only there for a minute. After driving madly in a circle three or four times, they go rumbling back down the hill.

  Then I start again.

  * * *

  —

  I was back staying at my mother’s, though I was hardly there. She had a boarder now in one of the rooms, a graduate student. One night I was sitting there on a nice August evening and decided that I was going to go for a bike ride naked. I don’t know what I thought this was going to accomplish. But I knew that now that I had thought of it, I had to accept the challenge and go ahead and do it.

  We lived at the top of Chamberlain Parkway, which is a very steep hill. When Evan and I were kids, we used to walk home from school, and I would start at the beginning of the hill with my arm around his shoulder in a brotherly way. About a quarter of the way up, I would have all of my weight supported by Evan, who couldn’t understand why he was having such a hard time getting up the hill. Evan would slowly realize and whine, “Don’t lean on me,” with the ee sound in lean drawn way out. This happened daily. Whenever Evan complains about anything today, which he rarely does, I go: “Don’t leeen on me.”

  If you have never ridden a bike naked, it’s fantastic. I think it’s the breeze on your bare skin. As I came flying down that hill, toward the bottom, as it opened onto Pleasant Street, which is a main street in Worcester, it was thrilling. The wind, the speed, and the sheer abandon and recklessness of it opened me.

  I’m naked, it’s about four a.m. and there are some cars. One follows me. This is a little scary. I later find out that it’s Mr. Crotty, who was the father of a friend of mine, Richard Crotty. Mr. Crotty was apparently quite amused and followed me, I assume just to see what the hell I was doing. I wonder what Mr. Crotty was doing out at four in the morning.

  I get all the way down Pleasant Street past Newton Square and go onto Lee Street, where I sneak onto Bill Noel’s wooden porch. Bill Noel’s mother is an absolute terror, so I have to be very quiet and not wake her. I tap gently on Bill’s window until he finally wakes up.

  “What are you doing, John?”

  “I’m naked. Do you want to go for a bike ride?”

  “Okay.”

  We ride around until it started to get light out. I’m nervous now about getting caught, because there was a star athlete named John McPartland who had been having sex with this girl behind Doherty High School. The girl ran off when the police came and he was found there alone and naked. He was forced to go in for months of psychological observation. If the police find me, they might not recognize the sheer genius of my act.

  I go into several backyards until I find one with a clothesline that has clothes on it. I finally find a tiny pair of orange shorts that must have belonged to a ten-year-old. I shimmy them on, say goodbye to Bill, and ride home.

  When I get home, the boarder was making his breakfast.

  “I saw your clothes on the floor in the living room and I just shook my head.”

  * * *

  —

  More than once I have witnessed the inexplicable. Once when I was walking home I heard the sound of thousands of bells in the sky. Kind of beautiful, like gentle sleigh bells. I couldn’t identify the direction. It sounded like the bells were spread across the sky.

  Another night, when I was about twelve, I was in the dining room listening to the Red Sox on the radio, while the rest of the family was in the living room watching TV. I saw hundreds of red flashing lights, coming through the bushes in the backyard, from up in the neighbor’s driveway. They looked like car brake lights, but there were way too many and they were at varying heights and flashing very, very fast. I ran into the TV room but didn’t say a word to anyone about whatever phenomenon I had just witnessed. Not sure why I am telling you now.

  One morning, as the sun was coming up, I walked down from Newton Hill after playing the horn. I was standing in the middle of Doherty High School’s football field. I love football fields and basketball courts, especially when they are empty.

  I saw a woman dressed all in black leaning over and picking something, halfway up the hill. I didn’t think anything of it and turned to watch the sunrise for not less than four seconds when I realized it was odd that this witchy-looking creature was out picking something on Newton Hill this early in the morning. I turned to see what she was doing and she had vanished. And there was no way for her to have just disappeared like that, it was open terrain in all directions.

  * * *

  —

  I went to a shrink to try to get out of the draft. He was a squat beast of a man whose trademark must have been his steady gaze.

  A toad who could stare.

  My mother was from Wales. While she was there visiting her mother, we were not supposed to drive the car. But I searched through her room and found the keys.

  We went for a drive out into the country. I sped up on a dirt road with pebbles pounding up underneath the car. Then the car froze. Died in the middle of nowhere.

  We walked back to a farmhouse to ask for help. A couple of guys in overalls walked over to the car with us.

  One got down under the car and had a look.

  He said, “You got a big hole in your oil pan. You can put all the oil you want in there and it will just run out onto the ground.” A line that Evan repeated for years after.

  So I guess that by driving with no oil, I had broken the engine of the car. Something my mom could hold over my head on any occasion that suited her.

  * * *

  —

  I went for a bike ride with Al the Rat. We were talking about having kids and Al said he would never bring kids into this fucked up world.

  We were riding down Highland Street, it was late and there were no cars. It was summer but not too hot, in fact, it was perfect. Light air blowing against my face on the bike. I love breeze. Breeze can make you fall in love. Breeze can make you fall in love with life.

  I’d let Al get ahead of me as we got onto Main Street—he was about a hundred yards ahead—when I had this moment. I remember the exact spot. I felt the benevolent connection of all things in life. I was filled with an optimism. Just in a moment it came over me and things changed for me after that. I can’t explain this moment, certainly not in a way that would do it justice. Particles were all part of one bigger thing and were floating and touching. Things that were solid were not solid at all.

  Particles floated. Just like that, life was everywhere. Prana, light from the tree, concrete was not solid nor inanimate. Caressed.

  This was not God saying hello. I had been invited.

  I was inside God’s brain.

  * * *

  —

  I spent the next few years trying to recapture whatever had unveiled itself and passed over me during that experience. It is abundantly clear that all beings and things are part of one life. During various periods of my life I have been very far and divorced from this philosophy. I have seen it as folly and wishful hallucination. But at that time, I wanted to repeat this experience more than anything. I just didn’t know how to go about it.

  Years later, Al the Rat came to one of The Lounge Lizards’ shows. He has lots of kids.

  I moved into a Kundalini yoga ashram. We got up at three a.m. every morning and took a cold shower, in an apartment that was always freezing because they were saving money on the heat. Then we did three hours of strenuous yoga exercises and chanting. These exercises were yoga postures done with a really violent approach. If the normal yogic pose was sitting on the floor with your legs in front of you and then bending to touch your toes, in Kundalini yoga, you would reach out as far past your toes as possible and then recoil, in a rhythm of about forty times per minute, over a ten-minute period. All the exercises were done with the “Breath of Fire.” This is something like the breathing one learns in Lamaze class, but faster and heavier.


  The basic idea behind Kundalini yoga was to have a Kundalini experience. According to them, at least at that time, it was not an experience possible for women. This is the rising of one’s sexual energy from the base of the spine up to the third eye. The purpose of sleeping very little and rising at three a.m. was to avoid having a wet dream. An orgasm was a loss of the sexual fluid and energy needed to achieve this cosmic event of a Kundalini experience.

  I didn’t know anything about raising my sexual energy. All I wanted to do was repeat the feeling of oneness and well-being that I’d had on the bike. I was eighteen and just at a period when releasing some sexual energy might have done me a world of good. I already suffered from acne, but the intense concentration on the third eye before I was ready caused me to be constantly afflicted with giant boils on my forehead, particularly between my eyes. I have scars there today.

  I was going to high school as a postgraduate student. I’d learned that if one’s father dies and one is still in school, then it is possible to receive Social Security benefits. When I found this out, I went to Mr. Connor, the principal, and told him I wanted to register to do another year of high school to improve my grades. He was suspicious and had been happy about the idea of getting rid of me. When Ted Kennedy came to speak at our high school shortly after Chappaquiddick, I was locked in the principal’s office by myself because they were terrified of what I might do or say.

  I convinced Mr. Connor that I was sincere about going back to high school as a postgraduate student in the hopes of getting into a better college. This way, I’d go to homeroom and cut out the rest of the day and then collect my $200 a month.

  The yogis all wore turbans. These were all white college students who dressed like Sikhs. They actually got me to wear a turban for a couple of days. This ended after I went to practice with our blues band and it was suggested with a snicker that we should change the name of the group to Turband.

  While I lived with the Kundalini people, I actually started going to school, because it was so cold in the apartment and because I liked the music teacher, Miss Giannini. Sometimes I’d practice the alto at the ashram, but they hated it. One younger yogi in particular hated it and felt it was sacrilegious for me to play my horn in the meditation room. The others disagreed and they had a big fight about it.

  I moved out after a couple months with acne welts all over my head.

  4

  I Come from Haunts of Coot and Hern, or, I Didn’t Kill Yogi Bhajan

  I still wanted to recapture the experience that I’d had on the bike. I wanted to have it all the time. It was the only thing that made sense to do because it was the only thing that made life make sense.

  I wanted to find my soul and live in it. All the time. That is all that concerned me. I became a monk of my own order, an ascetic, making up the rules as I went along. I put myself through the fire.

  I slept on the floor. Practiced yoga, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t eat meat, no sugar, no TV, no sex. I questioned everything. An ice cream sundae was a sin.

  I tried to do incredible feats of endurance, to challenge myself and force a crystallization. I’d practice the saxophone until my lips bled. I would hold a chair at arm’s length for as long as possible—really as long as possible—causing blinding pain. Twice I fasted and kept silent for ten days.

  I read everything I could about religion, mysticism, the occult.

  While other boys in their early twenties were out drinking, chasing girls, or developing careers, I lived like a hermit and drove myself close to insane. The realm of this world was not only an illusion, it was a waste of time. I wanted to pass through the veil.

  During a fast I had a dream that revealed to me the meaning behind the mathematical and geometric symbolism of the cross. I knew exactly what it really meant. But when I woke up, it was gone. I had lost it.

  I read somewhere about a woman who had fasted for a week and then eaten a potato and died, but it didn’t matter. I read that garlic cleansed your blood. I took ten cloves of garlic and put them in a blender with a few tablespoons of water. I was listening to Coltrane with big studio headphones and sat down to drink the garlic juice. I was a kid and had no idea how intense drinking ten cloves of garlic would be. I gulped it down and my brain rewired. For a moment I was tasting Coltrane and hearing the garlic.

  I’d leave the house, walk left, and turn left at each corner until I got back in front of my house. Then I would walk two blocks, turn left, two blocks, and do that until I was parallel to my house. Then three blocks, then left, in ever-widening concentric circles.

  I was completely uncomfortable with every facet of society. I couldn’t buy a pair of pants. I was incredibly shy. No girls. If a waitress looked at me, even if she clearly was no brighter than a shoebox, I would have to avert my eyes, as somehow she would know how unworthy I had become. If I wasn’t able to go into a restaurant and order a milkshake without being terrified, then let me move on from here.

  My mother was Welsh, and after my father died, she moved back to Wales. My dad had been stationed in North Wales at the end of World War II. The first time they met they were at a party playing charades. They were partners. My father drew a quote from a poem: “I come from haunts of coot and hern.” He stood there looking at the piece of paper, gathering his thoughts. My mother, without hearing a clue, blurted out, “I come from haunts of coot and hern!” I don’t know what poem that’s from or what the fuck it means, but they were married shortly after, and I owe my existence to that line of poetry and some psychic event at a party in North Wales, 1945.

  * * *

  —

  So my mom decided to go home. She went back under the guise of taking care of my grandmother, who didn’t really want or appreciate her help. Grandma was tough as nails. It was odd to watch my mother go through that thing of the daughter trying desperately to get her mother’s approval.

  I thought it bizarre that my mom just up and left the United States with me and Evan being so young. Of course, we pretended that we were old enough to take care of ourselves, that it was no big deal, but at seventeen and eighteen, that’s what you’re supposed to do. It was just a pose. But my mother called our bluff and took it to heart that she was no longer needed here. She sold off all the stuff from the house, including my baseball card collection, which would now be worth $8 million, then sold the house itself and moved back to Wales. This freaked me out a bit. Now Ev and I didn’t have a home. There would be nowhere to return to, nowhere safe to go when things got out of hand.

  I moved to Brookline, just outside of Boston, and lived in an apartment building, down the hall from my sister, Liz, and Michael Avery. I had no furniture. None. Lots of roaches and a tiny bathroom across the hall.

  I’d practice, read, listen to and study music, do yoga, and try not to masturbate. I started finding bits of myself in music. Tiny little breakthroughs.

  Devouring music from Bali and Tibet, Stravinsky, Varèse, Mingus, Messiaen, Dolphy, Monk, Ornette, Bird, Hendrix, Coltrane. Looking for something where colors were buzzing, something otherworldly or with a link between this realm and one less mundane.

  What I wanted most was my own voice on the alto. A sound that was me—not so much to be unique, but to find the person who seemed to be in danger of not appearing when standing in front of a mirror.

  I didn’t have a TV, but Claire Mallardi, the grande dame of dance at Radcliffe, where my sister taught, had asked me to take care of her cats and plants for a few days in her nice apartment on Beacon Street.

  “You have to run the water for a long time to make sure it is clean and cold.”

  I was practicing but had the black and white TV on with no sound. It was Martin Luther King’s birthday and they were playing a lot of his speeches. I turned the sound on and sat down on the bed, with my horn next to me, for a moment.

  It just hit me like a ton of
bricks. Look at this man. Listen to him.

  And I said, out loud, as I sat there, “Well, there is a God. And he is coming through that man.”

  Even more than what he was saying, it was the sound of him that struck me. The honesty resonating through him. Honesty in sound. That became everything to me.

  There is a line attributed to Mark Twain: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

  I had something very similar to this. When I was twelve, of course I didn’t listen to anything my parents had to say, but they would always speak of this Martin Luther King with great admiration. The only other thing that I remember their talking about with this much respect was The New Yorker and their impeccable fact-checking department. After the Martin Luther King experience, I was idiotically hopeful to think the magazine was still what it once was, some forty years later, and it almost ruined my life.

  * * *

  —

  On a freezing cold night in December, I decided to ride a bike back to Worcester, about forty-five miles away. It was midnight and it was fifteen degrees. The bike was a piece of shit. I pushed myself beyond what I could endure. It wasn’t anything I’d planned. I was watching TV with my sister and Michael and just got up and left.

  I was wearing a long gray coat with a little fur collar that I’d gotten at the thrift store in Coolidge Corner. I had to hike the coat up over my thighs so I could pedal.

  The wind was biting into my bones. At first it was exhilarating, then my eyes started to water and the tears froze to the sides of my face.

  The bike was so sluggish, and with the coat and long underwear, every stroke of the pedals felt like I was going up a steep hill. For about ten minutes I went as hard as I could, the harsh, cold air hitting my lungs so fiercely that I thought I was going to have to stop, but I was approaching an incline and coasted down for a while. A car drove by. A guy screamed out the window and it made me jump. Assholes, very funny. Then another car went by and someone threw a beer bottle at me. These people are having fun.