The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  After forever, I could look back behind me and see the sun was coming up. I was three miles or so from Worcester. At that time I had a big Rasputin beard that was frozen solid with drool. I could have given it a tiny smack and it would have broken off and shattered on the road.

  I got off the bike for a moment to look for the sunset and realized my legs had really had enough. I had to call Dean Cohen and ask him to pick me up.

  The next day I could hardly walk. The muscles in my legs were a gnarly, striated mess. Dean drove me back to Boston.

  Bill Noel came to visit me. He was in worse shape than I was. Something had happened to him when he had gone to Las Vegas to visit his brother. Now he was afraid to sleep and he thought that if he took a shit he would die. The way Bill told the story, his brother had the ability to make objects, like dice, move from several feet away without touching them. The Mafia was now holding his brother hostage because this talent was obviously beneficial to them in Las Vegas. I went back and forth from believing it to thinking it was totally absurd, but didn’t let Bill know. Everything he said was deeper than his normal voice, his head tucked down into his bearded neck. Once, when I had gone to Bill’s house in Worcester, he was standing on his head and smoking a cigarette.

  “Hello John! This is the smoking man’s yoga.”

  I finally got him to go to sleep on his second night in my place. In the morning, I felt there was some credence to his stories because about fifty flies were flying in a circle over his hunched up body.

  I smoked some pot with Michael and walked to the corner, where there were a bunch of guys playing basketball. I got in the game and played the best I ever had in my life. Could not miss, wild weird shots, all went in. The guy who was guarding me was good and clearly respected by the other players. He had played college ball somewhere. He was disgusted by this shit I was throwing up, but it just all kept going in, kept going in. And it wasn’t luck, it was something else. It was right. It was Zen in basketball.

  Michael and I were high and watching the news on TV. There was a ceremony of some kind and the mayor of Cleveland was using an acetylene torch to cut a wire or something, marking the grand opening. The sparks from the torch bounced back and set the mayor’s hair ablaze. You could hear this guy in the background screaming, “The mayor’s hair is on fire! The mayor’s hair is on fire!” The mayor stood there oblivious as his hair crackled, in flames. Michael and I were laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe. To this day I will just say, “The mayor’s hair is on fire!” and expect people to find it funny.

  There was a friend of my sister’s named Matia. She and I spent some time together, I guess as boyfriend and girlfriend, but I was so stuck in my turmoil that it seemed hopeless.

  I went cross-country with Kaz and his girlfriend Nancy to the Kundalini summer solstice, in Arizona. I thought I should give Kundalini one more try.

  Kaz was a harmonica player and was a few years older than me. I knew him through Michael Avery. I knew Nancy a little better than Kaz. She was a friend of my sister’s.

  We stopped at Kaz’s relatives’ somewhere on the way. We had dinner with Kaz’s aunt and uncle, or whoever they were, and I sat there in silence while they carried on polite conversation. At one point, Kaz’s uncle was eyeing my Malarski pants. One of the women from my mother’s bridge club was Ann Malarski. She had a son who had been in the navy. He must have been a large fellow, because the waist and length of these pants were enormous. Forty-six-inch waist, forty-inch length. My waist must have been twenty-eight inches around at that time, so I was swimming in them. I rolled up the bottoms of the pants and used a piece of white rope to tie them around me, so that they wouldn’t fall down. In big black handwritten letters, just above the ass, was written the identification “MALARSKI.” And that is why they were called Malarski pants. I felt shy to have him staring at my pants. I was shy to have him even acknowledge my existence. I had the feeling that they thought I was a heathen or perhaps even dangerous in my strangeness.

  After dinner, they were sitting around having a drink and the uncle turned to me and said, “So, John, what’s your story? What do you do?”

  I said—and this is probably the most uncomfortably awkward thing that has ever exited human lips—“I am in pursuit of a yoga that suits my metabolism.”

  A pained and confused grimace floated across everyone’s face in unison and then they, mercifully, didn’t try to include me in the conversation further.

  We drove and drove. I was fascinated by the dead animals on the highway in the desert. Every time we saw something, I would go, “What was that?”

  Kaz said, “You’re really into DOR.”

  “What’s DOR?”

  “Dead On Road.”

  We had an empty two-gallon plastic water container in the back. I was nervous about getting there because I knew that I wasn’t going to wear a turban. I knew everybody else would be wearing them, but I wasn’t going to do it. I put the plastic container on my head and kept saying over and over how jealous those yogis were going to be when they saw my turban. I kept the thing on my head for hours because I knew it was annoying Kaz, and Nancy found it funny.

  Finally, we reached the spot in the desert where they were holding the Kundalini yoga seminar. This thing was based around a form of tantric yoga. We all kept silent for seven days and slept in tents. Everyone was required to have a partner of the opposite sex. Kaz hooked me up with his beautiful ex-girlfriend Vicky Kennick, so that I could do the exercises with her. I think Vicky was there to do this thing with Kaz and he had brought me along as a replacement, since he had a new girlfriend now.

  During the day we would line up in scores of long two-by-two rows, with men on the right and women on the left of each row. There were easily a thousand people there, so the rows stretched out forever. In the morning we would hold three different postures for an hour each, while staring into our partner’s eyes.

  After a very short amount of time, while holding these difficult yoga postures, I would be looking into the beautiful face of Vicky Kennick and orange flaming lights would be bursting from her nose.

  Three sets of one-hour postures in the morning and then three sets again in the afternoon. And every one of these thousand or so yogis was keeping silence. The only person who talked during the whole thing was Yogi Bhajan, who sat up on a makeshift stage with a microphone, giving instructions and explaining that mung beans and rice were the meal for the Aquarian Age.

  I realized years later that I had gained something from this seminar. Previous to this, I had been terrified of women, and because I was terrified, I hated them. This changed all that. But then, at seventeen or eighteen, being in the desert, being told what to do at every moment, and being under the incontestable authority of Yogi Bhajan made me get weird. I had heard that the year before, Yogi Bhajan, guided by light, was randomly marrying people who had never met before. I didn’t want to be under this massive authority. Everyone there was wearing a turban but me and I was wearing Malarski pants. I was the obscene, lost renegade.

  * * *

  —

  I lay in my tent one night, very unhappy and more confused than I have ever been. I was, of course, madly in love with Vicky Kennick, who was not interested in me as I was some four years younger. But that is not what made me crazy. What made me crazy was being part of this enforced community, with its enforced spiritualism. It wasn’t that the thing was that phony, I just didn’t fit in and I was going through giant changes. Maybe I just wasn’t getting it. Maybe it was me, I was too dark in my soul.

  One night, I lay there on the cold desert ground, in my tent, and decided that I would kill Yogi Bhajan. I would sneak over to his tent and hack off his head with a cleaver from the kitchen. If he was enlightened, then he would know and stop me, or if he was enlightened, he would know and allow it to happen, or if he was not enlightened, he would not know and he was a sham any
way and I would have done the world a favor.

  But I didn’t kill Yogi Bhajan, maybe I didn’t have the nerve, but I think I was just too tired and it was cold outside of my tent.

  When it was over, I went back in another van. Went to Chicago and dropped off Vicky Kennick and then back to Boston. I hardly remember the ride back except that it was odd to be in a metal contraption as it hurtled forward at seventy miles an hour on a neverending strip of concrete.

  Evan moved to Boston and got his own apartment in the same building as me and Liz. Had his piano moved in. He was going to high school for the seventh year in a row. I don’t really know what he was hoping to accomplish by finishing high school at fifty-one years old, but he went.

  He was in class with Michio Kushi’s kid. Michio Kushi is the person who introduced the macrobiotic diet to America. According to Evan, Michio Kushi’s kids’ teeth were falling out because they’d never had milk.

  We would eat dinner together and then play, wildly, in his apartment. Cecil Taylor on speed. Evan had the dog, Max. My mother couldn’t take him because to go to England, the dog would have had to spend six months in quarantine, Great Britain being very proud of the fact that they had stamped out rabies.

  I was walking Max when he got in a fight with another dog. I tried to break it up by grabbing Max’s collar and got bitten by my own dog. You could see the bone under the blood.

  * * *

  —

  Cotton blocks me from the world. I can’t hear a thing, and what I can hear I can’t understand. My mother talks for me.

  We’ve landed in London and the pressure on landing has blocked my ears. That and the accent make it impossible for me to understand anything.

  My mother, who must have been quite lonely, has convinced me that if I am to follow the path of a mystic ascetic, then I should truly seek solitude. It’s winter and she knows of someone’s summer home in Wales that I can stay in for free. This little home is up in the hills in Abersoch and there won’t be anyone around for miles. She was daring me and I took her up on it.

  The house is barren and concrete and not equipped for winter. I take all the electric heaters and put them in one room. With the heat, a giant black fly comes to life and bombards my solitude. I think that this is a bad omen. This fly could most certainly be the Devil.

  During that period, I always slept on the floor. I had peanuts, porridge, and brown rice. The air was cold and damp, always cold and damp and gray. There were sheep in my front yard and no one around for about three miles. My mom and grandma lived in my grandma’s little house in the village. My grandma had had this place for a hundred years.

  Grandma was tall and strong, with an iron face that had been lived in. She’d sit by the fire and was quite pleased with her life. She had just given up smoking. My mom asked her if it was hard for her to stop, and she said that the doctor had asked her so nicely that she just stopped.

  I don’t know exactly what I hoped to accomplish by putting myself into complete seclusion. I was uncomfortable with myself and I was looking for some kind of breakthrough. I’d practice the alto and was reading all kinds of different books on religion, mysticism, the occult, and magic. I got completely lost in P. D. Ouspensky’s book on George Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous.

  Matia came over for a few days; that was nice but had nothing to do with what I was trying to accomplish. We didn’t get along very well.

  She thought that what I was doing was nuts. Which, of course, was a fair assessment, I have to admit, except for this: I gained something from putting myself through this. Something deep inside me. A certain kind of strength in the essence that is me. Something I am continually shocked to find that most people do not have.

  Also, people always talk about talent. But really, of this I am quite certain: There is no such thing as talent, there is only cleaning the mirror.

  * * *

  —

  A few days after Matia had left, on my birthday, I went down into the village and had a miserable dinner with my mom and grandma. I broke my regime and had wine and cake. On the way back up the hill I felt awful, saw a shooting star, and then I cursed God.

  I turned on the electric heaters and went to sleep on the floor. Cold, lonely, and unhappy. I was violently awakened by lights flashing into the room. I thought that I heard my mother calling outside and that the lights must have been from her car, but my mother wasn’t there. Something was happening. I was terrified and ran out of the house. I had heard that the Native Americans had hugged trees in times of psychic peril. It was pitch black and I was stumbling on the gravel road. I found a tree and hugged it, but when I looked up I saw that it was dead, with a ripped piece of clothing dangling from one of the barren branches. This was really upsetting. I felt I was in danger, like I had taken myself too far into some unexplored psychic realm and had perhaps done irreparable damage. I found my way down the hill, toward my grandmother’s house, but it was only four in the morning, so I went to walk along the beach. I thought about my dad. It was almost the first time since he’d died that I really thought about him.

  * * *

  —

  Up in the cliffs along the shore, I saw something. Three creatures. I started to climb up the rocks toward them. I was sure this would be a sign for me. These creatures looked wild and mythic, like something out of Homer. I got close enough to see that they were wild rams. Tough, agile, fearless. I was jealous.

  I go to London, stay in a bed and breakfast. I can’t stay in that house anymore, I’m too afraid. In London, I go to a jazz jam session, one of those horribly annoying unmusical events where there are eighty-three saxophone players waiting to get up and noodle forever. It seems much more like an amateur competition than a musical event. Beer and cigarettes. A tough-looking little guy with an army jacket and long frizzy hair goes up to the stage. He looks like Sonny Bono marinated in beer. His teeth are bad. He looks mean and plays and plays, but not music. This should be a contest, it’s all testosterone.

  It seems a terrible thing—music being what I believe it is—these saxophone players who spend all their time trying to play as close to Charlie Parker as possible. What a horrendous way to spend your musical life, or your life at all, trying to do the same thing someone else has already done but far better than you ever will.

  I drink a beer and have a hard-boiled egg. Things not allowed in my regime. In this very unpleasant atmosphere, I slowly, uncomfortably, descend back to this planet. I’m going to stop torturing myself and stay here for a while.

  5

  I Am the Supreme Totality!

  There were signs all over his apartment that stated: “I AM THE SUPREME TOTALITY!”

  I went back to Boston for a while and then went to New York to visit Matia, who I guess I’d have to say was my girlfriend. We went to the museums and to hear music. People seemed tough, with jagged faces, yet less mean in the petty way they seemed in Boston. It was exciting and weird and immediately felt like home.

  I went to see the tenor player Sam Rivers in a loft somewhere. I was by myself. Matia and I had had a fight. Sam Rivers didn’t show up and someone awful took his place. I actually remember who it was, but I met this musician years later and he was such a sweetheart, I won’t mention his name here. In any case, I was there to see Sam Rivers, and when they announced that he would not be playing and who would be playing, the guy sitting next to me grunted in disapproval. I agreed and said, “Yuck.”

  We started talking about not wanting to see this replacement music and left. This guy was maybe forty-five, black, with a gnarly, muscle-clad body. Had a little beard and wore a knit hat. His strong fingers looked like they could pry open an oyster. He invited me out to his place in Brooklyn.

  He lived in the basement of these two buildings on Caton Avenue, near Flatbush. You had to walk down a skinny alley between the two buildings and then pass through a courtyard
before you got to a green door that was the only access to the foreboding basement and clearly not intended for tenants. Then you went into the hot concrete underbelly of the building and past the boiler before you got to the padlocked wire door that led to his apartment, which was really a storage closet vaguely transformed into living quarters.

  He was the superintendent. He’d sweep and mop the corridors on all six floors of the two buildings and take the trash and put it in the compactor. A few other little jobs that went along with his duties paid him $14 every two weeks and he got this dwelling in the torrid basement for free.

  I can recall exactly what the place smelled like, but I cannot put my finger on what that smell was. Maybe sweet incense trying to mask some fetid something.

  There was an upright piano, a couch, and a bed in a second tiny room. All over the apartment were hand-painted signs that proclaimed, “I AM THE SUPREME TOTALITY!”

  His name was James Parker Washington, and he had just gotten out of jail for murder. He had such a beautiful, unassuming gentleness that I was never nervous around him for a moment.

  He offered me some tea and said that I could stay there with him as long as I wanted. So I slept on the couch and the next day, I went to Matia’s and got my duffel bag and my horn and moved in.

  He would make some kind of health food gruel and tea, and then we would play. Him on the piano and me on alto. Then late at night I would go through the empty hallways with him mopping the floors and talking about music and religion.