The History of Bones

by John Lurie

He explained the hand-painted signs to me: One night he had smoked a joint and was sitting back in a chair with his eyes closed. He was drifting, but not asleep, when he heard a loud voice giving him a message inside his head that said, “I AM THE SUPREME TOTALITY!” and he realized that it was true. This was not an egotistical thing—quite the opposite, it announced that he was part of God.

  Ever since then he had changed.

  A sweet girl with big breasts was always stopping by and bringing him food. She had a kid and was on her own.

  She wanted Jim. Smiling at him. Beaming. She seemed completely smitten. He was very nice but apparently not interested in getting intimate with her. She was clearly disappointed. He seemed nervous. There was a part of him that was deeply, deeply wounded. You could see it when he looked off and down to the floor.

  “Why don’t you sleep with her?”

  “Oh, no.” But that was as far as he wanted to explain.

  One night he started rubbing my shoulders. Strong hands, felt great. Like getting rid of those knots would add five years of health to my life.

  “Here, lie down.”

  So I stretched out on the couch. I was disappearing under the massage when I felt him poke with deliberation at my anus through my pants. I sprung up from the couch and halfway across the room.

  “What the fuck are you doing?!”

  “I just wanted to…fuck, you know?” He was looking at the floor. He looked sad and ashamed.

  “I’m not into that, Jim.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  His vibe was clearly straight, and there was that sweet girl who wanted him. I think that all those years in jail just made him want to have sex like how he was used to.

  He showed me how to use the compactor. Then James Parker Washington announced that he was leaving the day after tomorrow and if I wanted his job, he would square it with the building manager.

  So as simple as that, I had moved to New York.

  It was kind of wonderful, in a way, to sweep and mop the floors in the middle of the night with no one anywhere. Long, empty night hallways. I liked having some specific menial task, and most of the time, I liked being alone. I had trouble making myself get up to sweep, but once I did, I always enjoyed it. I think that this kind of work is good for people, especially people like me, who are stuck living deeply in their heads.

  The compactor scared me, a big, bellowing monster of a thing that inhaled the trash and spat it out in little squares, but I did all right with it.

  So I would do these chores and then practice. One day, I was playing my horn and this man’s voice came booming through the courtyard.

  “Shut up!!”

  I didn’t know if he meant me, waited five minutes, and then started playing again, quieter. A few minutes later I heard someone walking in the basement. No one ever came down there. Hard shoes on the concrete floor. A tough-looking guy in a T-shirt was ducking under the low concrete roof and approaching the wire door.

  “I need to sleep. You have to stop. I hate that kind of music.”

  How am I going to save the world with my music if that’s the effect that it has on people?

  It was during this time that I fasted for ten days and had the vision and understanding about the cross. I kept trying to fast to understand things further but would find myself walking across Prospect Park in the middle of the night to buy a gallon of Breyers ice cream, which I would eat in one sitting and then be overwhelmed with guilt.

  I’m making oatmeal for my breakfast, I look up, and outside the wire door is a thin guy just standing there. Very clean, short blond hair. White, white shirt and glasses.

  How do these people get so clean? I try to get clean, I wash, I wash my clothes, but I could never look that clean. It’s like he’s been boiled or something.

  “Are you confused about the meaning of life? May I come in, to talk with you?”

  I let him in because I was deeply confused about the meaning of life.

  “Have you found Jesus?”

  He goes on with his little fervent spiel. And at the end, somehow, he gets me to get down on my knees and pray to Jesus. He is very pushy and I am lost and I am searching, but this isn’t right. This isn’t what I want. But he is so insistent, I do it just to get him to leave.

  After his conquest, he leaves quickly. I feel like he has stolen something from me. I feel violated and am filled with shame. Somehow I feel as though I have been soiled by this little creep in the clean white shirt, who honestly had no more interest in God than I had in pork belly futures.

  After a few weeks I went up to Germantown, New York, where Steve Piccolo was living with his wife, Wendy. They both were going to Bard College, and during the summer they had rented a little cottage. I was only going to stay for a day, but Wendy kept convincing me that it was silly for me to go back to Brooklyn. She was very manipulative and I didn’t like her, but I stayed because it seemed too hard to go back to being completely alone in a basement.

  I stay almost a week, and when I get back, trash is piled everywhere and there is a note on the wire door saying that I have to come to the manager’s office.

  He fires me. I couldn’t possibly blame him. He just looked at me like, how could I do that, just disappear after taking the responsibility? I can still see his face, and somehow, I have to thank him. He didn’t yell or act pissed. He just, for a moment, looked right into me, and without saying a word, the message came through: You know that’s not right, kid. This is life and that is just not right.

  * * *

  —

  I moved up to Germantown, where Wendy insisted that Steve and I get jobs. She found me a job at a fruit cocktail packing company. The smell was horrifying. I will never eat fruit cocktail again, ever, and I think it is the reason that to this day, I cannot even eat fruit from the deli or anywhere else where it has been precut.

  I was strange and skinny. I had absolutely no skills in dealing with people because I’d never really dealt with people. Everyone on the job site stayed as far as possible from the new guy. I thought that I could fit in, but no way. People worked in pairs and the foreman came to me.

  “Lurie, why doesn’t anyone want to work with you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and tried to hide the fact that it was something that was really beginning to hurt me.

  Then new guys came after me and they fit right in. It was me, they smelled something on me. I wasn’t like them.

  The foreman gave me a job where I worked by myself. I had to carry boxes of canned fruit cocktails in and out of a large freezer room. The stench was awful and my sweat would freeze to me as I went back in from the outside summer heat.

  I will never eat fruit cocktail again.

  I quit the job, had a fight with Wendy, and went back to New York. Wendy was trying to get us to all have sex together and I wanted absolutely no part of it. I had no money, so I couldn’t take a cab, and all my shit was in a big army duffel bag, which got so heavy that I just started to drag it behind me, bouncing on the Manhattan pavement. I had no idea where to go, and the bottom of the duffel bag was tearing. Distributing socks and underwear all over Thirty-fourth Street.

  I called my uncle Jerry, who told me to come over to his place on Fifty-seventh Street. He had a very romantic penthouse duplex on Fifty-seventh between Sixth and Seventh avenues. I slept on the couch. Jerry was moving to a much bigger place on Central Park West after living in his idyllic bachelor pad for a quarter of a century. The rent was $130 a month. I wanted to continue to live there after he left, but he said that that would be illegal. Jerry was a lawyer. And he was a good man. I believe the term is a mensch.

  He gave me a job sorting his hundreds of books by category and then packing them up. I don’t think that he really needed this, and often I had no clue what category some of the books should go into, but did the best I could.
/>   There were steaks in the icebox, and by now I had started eating meat again. My skin was growing to be less the color of paper. I would fry up a steak and then down it with a big glass of whiskey from Uncle Jerry’s bar. He didn’t drink himself but had a full bar for visitors.

  Then he said that his new place was under construction but that he supposed if I didn’t mind the noise and the mess, I could sleep there. So I moved my horn and duffel bag over to this construction site that would eventually be a luxury apartment on Central Park West, with an amazing view of the park.

  I slept in a sleeping bag in the front room, which had a big picture window that floated over the park. A cord with an ornate tassel hung to the ground from a contraption that closed the curtains. One night I dreamed that I had severed the cord with my teeth. I woke up and went out to Central Park, and when I got back to the apartment, workmen were moving sheetrock from one room to the other. Over in the corner I saw the severed curtain cord. I was sure that there must have been some significance to this, but I didn’t know what the hell it was.

  My uncle got me a job at the Plaza Hotel. I was the new night housekeeping dispatcher. If Milton Berle needed more pillows, I would call Elsie or Beverly and have them bring some pillows to Mr. Berle.

  I loved the maids. They were mostly Jamaican and Haitian, and they were wonderful. We would constantly tease one another back and forth. I felt like one of them.

  There was a big, older, angry Irish guy named John who did the maintenance work. His response to pretty much everything was, “They can go pound sand up their ass.”

  I worked from four in the afternoon until midnight, which was fine with me. From four p.m. to six p.m. there was a lot of work, making lists of checkouts and rooms to be cleaned. Then at six p.m. it would slow down, and unless a guest needed something, there was nothing much to do. I would bring my horn and practice or steal Plaza stationery and draw in my little cubicle, surrounded by fresh, clean towels.

  * * *

  —

  My pursuit of mystical transcendence was still there but not a constant preoccupation. I would flirt with the maids. But oddly enough, the person I ended up sleeping with was my boss, Miss Andrade. She was fifty-two. This is 1974, so I must have been twenty-two. She was Swedish and quite pretty for any age. Other guys at work were always hitting on her and couldn’t figure out why she was with that weirdo when people caught wind of our little fling.

  I never stopped calling her Miss Andrade. Even after I’d slept with her two or three times, I still called her Miss Andrade. Her real name was Guri, but I just couldn’t feel that. Evan met her and found it extremely disconcerting that I didn’t call her by her first name. Mostly, we just had sex in the housekeeping department when nobody was around, but a couple of times I went out to her place in Jackson Heights. She put maple syrup on my cock and licked it off. She really had no zest whatsoever in sucking my cock. This was something that she had clearly read about in a magazine: “Interesting Ways to Perk Up Your Sex Life!”

  But she was fun. I spent one very weird New Year’s Eve with her. Somehow the idea of New Year’s Eve with her pointed out the complete gulf, and it made me sad for her. My God, Miss Andrade, if she is still around, must be close to a hundred. If you are still around, Miss Andrade, a warm, heartfelt hello to you.

  * * *

  —

  My first real place in New York was a railroad apartment on Fourteenth Street between First and Second avenues. There was no shower and only a tiny little bathtub that I never used.

  I joined the Jewish Y next door so I could take showers there and started to play a lot of basketball.

  The apartment was on the top floor of a six floor walk-up. The building was owned by the Puerto Rican family who had the bodega on the ground floor.

  There was another mattress for Evan, who wasn’t really living anywhere at the time. A woman downstairs ranted on and on for hours at a stretch. She was screaming at her husband, and she would scream and scream until her voice had cracked and broken and then keep on screaming. It was unbelievable, I’ve never heard anything like it. I used to take a baseball bat and smash on the pipes to get her to stop. It never worked.

  The screaming was so intense it was clear the woman was raving mad. I didn’t want to have any direct contact. I never saw either the husband or the wife on the stairs, and I don’t think that they ever left their apartment.

  Pretty much every day I would get up, go play ball at noon, eat, and then go up to the Plaza by subway. When he was around, Evan and I always got along really well. The only thing we ever fought about was socks.

  Then one time the shrieking was just too much, and I went downstairs and knocked on the door. That was a mistake. The husband answered the door, but what I remember was her. She stood lurking behind him, in mostly darkness, with this malicious half smile, the face and power of a true demon. The smile said, You want to mess with us, honey, go right ahead. Her fingernails were a full three inches long and curled toward her palms. The madness was terrifying. I never knocked or banged on the pipes again. She had me beaten with a glance.

  * * *

  —

  I had bought a flute and a clarinet and was working on them a little bit. When I came home one day, someone had come through the window off the fire escape and stolen them. I had my alto with me and didn’t really feel that bad. I’m not that fond of the flute, and the clarinet fingering was different from the alto and a little confusing. But I knew that Life or God or whatever controlled how things went, would never let my alto get stolen. That just couldn’t possibly happen, and even though I had just been robbed and the window still didn’t lock, I didn’t think that much about it because I was sure that anything that I really needed in life would not be taken from me.

  It was summer. I’d saved a little money and I was just about to quit the Plaza to work on music full time. I went to the Museum of Modern Art, and when I got home my alto was gone. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it.

  I was heartbroken, but not only was I heartbroken, I was shocked that something like this could happen. It wasn’t like I was fearless, but I just believed that somehow one is protected. I used to practice, every night, in the subway station on the corner of Fourteenth and First. I’d go in about midnight, walk all the way down to the end of the platform, and play until two or three in the morning. I was never even nervous about it. The Canarsie line didn’t come that often and there were few people using that stop at that hour. But really, New York on the Lower East Side was one hundred times more dangerous then than it is now, and if I heard about someone doing that now, I would think they were insane.

  There was one moment when I was on Second Avenue near Thirteenth Street that is just sort of frozen in my memory. I had the same thing when my mom died, just this one spot, during one stride on the pavement and a glance at the sign of the store that sold nurses’ uniforms, where it really hit me. Just one moment in time. Just how horrible it was and how deep it went into me that my horn was gone.

  I go in to tell the landlords, the Hispanic couple who ran the bodega downstairs. I tell them that I was robbed. They just stare at me like, So? What do you want us to do about it?

  I go up to Forty-eighth Street to see if I can get a decent alto with the money that I had saved from the Plaza. My alto was a beautiful Selmer Mark VI; old horns are much better and more expensive than new horns. They were made better and have more warmth and resonance. I am there at the counter and I can see the price tags, and this is nowhere near what I can afford. There is a guy there talking about these six soprano saxophones that somebody is selling in this little shop downtown for three hundred apiece. So I go down and buy one. It’s a silver Conn, a straight soprano.

  Now I’ve got a little money left but not much and decide to move back to Boston. I can’t remember why. I had hated Boston.

  Rudy has a car, and he
says if I get a U-Haul he’ll drive me up to Boston. I had met Rudy in Boston when I was a few years younger. He was round and black and had a grin halfway between the Cheshire cat’s and Buddha’s. He had gone out with my sister, but just for a minute. Rudy introduced me to the music of Lester Young, Billie Holiday, and others. Beautiful, magical worlds that became part of my being. He was maybe five years older than me. Rudy was very into Ramana Maharshi, Meher Baba, and other mystics, as well as the Bible. He used to have a job running the projector at a theater in Boston’s Combat Zone, which was then a porno district.

  I would go down and visit him and watch The Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat five times in a row, back to back, from the little booth. Leave the theater with him at dawn, have some greasy eggs in a diner, and then go watch a gaggle of Bruce Lee movies in the neighboring theater. Like to wash the porn from our brains.

  A few months after that, Rudy wrote religious slogans all over the walls of his apartment and disappeared.

  I moved back into the building with Liz and Michael and got a job driving a cab. I didn’t really know my way around. I’d get a call from the dispatcher on the radio saying car number 314, go to such and such a place, and I would look it up on a map.

  The second night, around three a.m., I picked up a go-go dancer outside of a strip club. She wouldn’t tell me where she wanted to go. We just drove with the meter off. She was sexy in that dirty sort of way in her purple scanty outfit. Her eyes looked odd and somewhat empty. I realized years later that they were pinned because she was on heroin. Finally she said that she wanted to go to my place. I said okay. I brought the cab back to the garage. The guys at the garage wondered where on earth she’d come from but didn’t say anything. I walked her back to my apartment, which was right down the block on Harvard Avenue.

  We had sex once and then I wanted to fuck her in the ass; I’d never done it and thought that she might be into it, being older and obviously more experienced. She reacted with horror, like she’d never heard of such a thing. There was something very strange about her, maybe because her eyes were pinned. I was afraid to go to sleep. I was convinced that she was from outer space and might kill me.