The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  * * *

  —

  My mom had bought a house in Anglesey. You could see the cold water of the Menai Strait rushing by from her front window. Always seemed cold, and the air was so clean and brisk that it hurt. Now she had Max the dog. She had put him in a kennel for six months’ quarantine. WE THE BRITISH ARE PROUD OF HAVING NO RABIES!!!!!

  The house was a nice little house, but there was a horrible green and yellow rug that was left over from the last owner. My mom couldn’t have had a lot of money, but she had some from the insurance and some from selling the house. I was shocked that she, who had always had such good taste, would leave that ghastly carpet in her living room.

  She was drinking a lot.

  The neighbor had a dog that her son had named Franco’s Dead. The son was off at college and you would hear the mom, with her sweet little voice, out on the porch calling the dog in: “Franco’s Dead! Franco’s Dead!” Trying to get the dog to come home.

  I always felt sluggish around then, and I found that if I stayed awake for a couple of days it would break the cycle, and by the second day I would feel more alive. I had been up all night drawing and my mom came down in the morning. It was Sunday and she was reading the London Sunday Times. There was a contest: The idea was to add the funniest or cleverest caption to a photo from the paper. My mother was working hard on her entry. I found a picture of a farmer in a field with rows of cabbages, and there were little bubbles coming out of the cabbages like they were singing “Rule Britannia!” My caption was “Lettuce Sing.”

  I kept telling my mom, “You can stop now, I’ve already won.” I was so punchy from not sleeping, I was laughing my head off.

  “Oh, you are daft.” When you were being silly and she didn’t want to laugh she would say you were daft.

  After she went to sleep, I would practice in the little cold kitchen. It must have been loud for her upstairs, but she encouraged me to keep playing.

  She was a good sport about stuff like that. When I was eleven or twelve, I thought I was going to be a pitcher in the major leagues one day. I would be out in the backyard, throwing a hard rubber ball against the side of the house, over and over again, as hard as I could. It must have been incredibly loud inside the house, but she never complained about it once.

  I went back and forth between Wendy’s and my mom’s for a while. Evan was hanging out with a brilliant priest named Liam. Liam would drink whiskey in his council flat and get really mean. But he had a wonderful evil twinkle in his eye and could be really funny, when I could understand what he was saying through his accent.

  Wendy was as violently nasty as she was sexy. They kind of went hand in hand. We would have fights where we would each be standing at one of the two windows of her apartment, throwing each other’s stuff out into the street. The blue scarf that my mother had knit me, Wendy took scissors and cut it into tiny little squares.

  We had a fight—we were always fighting—then went to sleep, and I woke up to being punched hard in the nose. We would fight like mad and then have sex. She would look at me with this impish grin and say, “You can do anything you want to me.” Which was irresistible.

  I wrote and played music for Wendy’s dance and some other dancers, and then just got tired of damp, cold, poor London, where nobody had a phone, and decided to go back home to New York. Wendy was at the train platform with me before I went to my place and got my stuff to go to the airport. This was basically goodbye, but we were fighting and fighting.

  She could say something like, “You stupid sod!” with so much venom in her voice it made me want to kill her.

  So the train pulls up and we’re fighting. I get on the train and she is on the platform telling me that I am selfish or stupid or some such thing. Then, as the train started to inch away, I realized I wasn’t going to see her again. Or if I saw her again, she would be with her husband and two kids. I just yelled, “Oh, Wendy,” like, What have we done?

  7

  Crushed Bandit

  I moved into a place with friends on Second Avenue. A big apartment on the third floor between St. Marks and East Seventh Street. All my friends were actually moving out soon. They had qualified for government housing at Cooper Square and were moving into fifty-five dollar a month apartments on Third and Fourth Street that were given to people who could prove a low enough income.

  I used my status as an insane person on SSI to apply myself, but it took months, even a year, to get approved. Pretty soon I was living in the Second Avenue apartment by myself. In 1977, rents weren’t like they are now. It cost $270 a month for this enormous, halfway decent apartment.

  When I was still in Boston, Rick, Francie, and Gerri, the people who were at Second Avenue when I moved in, had all lived in a loft on Bond Street. When I would come to New York, I would crash at their place. They lived on the second floor. The fourth floor was vacant, and I used to go up there to practice so that I wouldn’t bother anybody.

  The person referred to as Rick preferred, in later life, to be called Richard. Richard Morrison. I have to say this somewhere, so I will say it here: I have met countless amazing people in my life, but I learned more from Richard Morrison than, perhaps, anyone else. He was a true artist. And he was an artist with so much integrity that, of course, no one has ever heard of him.

  But somehow try to grasp this: Things Richard Morrison passed on to me are things that I passed on to Jean-Michel Basquiat a few years later. While you can have some understanding of the strangeness of a painting selling for $110 million, you may not understand this. But I was there and I know. You read this stuff and see these movies where people try to glom on to Jean-Michel and his value and what it can do for their lives, but I know this: Richard Morrison was the real deal, and indirectly, Jean-Michel, who was also the real deal, got a ton from Rick, through me.

  I had begun to find myself musically, and what I was doing was different. This guy named Vance heard me playing and was fascinated. Vance was black, overly groovy, and “in control.” His clothes were always freshly pressed. Even his jeans had a crease in them. His Afro was perfectly round. He had a horribly affected voice and was so intent on appearing sane, the way he would enunciate words or slow down to construct a sentence, that it seemed obvious to me that he was completely out of his fucking gourd.

  Vance had bought a saxophone and been playing for three years. But you knew immediately that this was not now, nor would ever be, a horn player. What Vance was, in his actual life, was a drug dealer.

  I ran into him on the street, soon after I got back. Vance first wanted to know about my sister. He had met her somewhere and wanted to hook up with her. Right. Like I was going to hook up this phony, insane person with my sister. He talked to me, at length, about not being able to get an erection if he wore a condom, information that I really didn’t want to think about.

  But Vance had an interesting offer. He wanted to front me pot—lots of it. Like twenty fucking pounds of pot. Whatever I didn’t sell, I could return. What he really wanted was a safe place to store it, but he wouldn’t come right out and say that. That became clearer two nights later when I got a call from Vance at four a.m., saying his brothers had to come over immediately.

  I was disappointed because I thought that he was going to take his pot back, but his brothers came running up the stairs ten minutes later and had garbage bags full of marijuana. Another twenty pounds, maybe even more. They must have been expecting a raid.

  Vance’s brothers did not say a word to me. Came into my place, dropped the weed in bags on the living room floor. Didn’t even make eye contact. On the way out, they stopped, reached in their pockets in unison, held their guns out for a moment for me to see. The display was so well timed, I thought they could have been synchronized swimmers with dreadlocks. Then they left without speaking, still not making eye contact.

  * * *

  —

  I dec
ided that I wanted to do a performance in my giant apartment. All I had to do was knock down the double walls that held the big wooden doors in the living room and I could fit twenty-five people seated and have enough room for the play that I wanted to make called Crushed Bandit.

  Rick, who used to live in the apartment, said that he didn’t think that these were structural walls and that it would be easy to knock them down.

  These were big, thick walls in the middle of the place. Smoking tons of Vance’s pot, I spent hours and hours, and then days and days, smashing at the walls with a sledgehammer. At first, it was a blast to smash away at the walls like that.

  Then it got awful. Dust was everywhere. I came home with groceries and as I walked up Second Avenue, I could see billows of dust floating out of my windows hours after I had stopped.

  It was 1977, incredibly hot that summer. I would be naked in the apartment, stoned and smashing away with all the windows open.

  I find out that the mean Albanian guy who runs the newspaper stand down the block wants to kill me. The people in the store downstairs say I better be very careful. I have bought cigarettes from this guy and I know just from looking at him that his wacko eyes are wired for violence. I also saw him go nuts on somebody twice his size.

  “Why does he want to hurt me? I didn’t do anything to him.”

  “His fourteen-year-old daughter is watching you naked in the apartment. She is home from school and he keeps catching her watching you.”

  I’m so stoned all the time that it has never occurred to me that every single person in the buildings on the other side of Second Avenue can see right into my place. New York always seemed such a blur of activities and people that it never dawned on me that, in a sense, each block is still a neighborhood, and that some people know every little thing that is happening.

  I have been lugging all the debris down and throwing it into a dumpster right in front of my place on Second Avenue. Apparently, this is no good. I just thought, There is a dumpster full of trash, I’ll throw my shit in there. But I am throwing barrels and barrels and barrels of wall and dust and plaster into this thing and filling it up all with my own debris. Whoever has rented this dumpster for their own job is really pissed off and also is looking for me.

  All the pot is making me paranoid. I feel like I am being watched at all times. Then Vance calls. He needs the twenty pounds of pot that he dropped off plus whatever I haven’t sold back immediately.

  It’s unbearably hot, 104 degrees, as I lug a suitcase filled with forty pounds of marijuana over to Vance’s house. I am a little nervous. If everybody knows everything, I am going to get arrested. Plus, forty pounds in a suitcase starts to get heavy after a few blocks.

  The suitcase is getting heavier and it’s 104 and it feels like big particles of New York are bombarding me and sticking to my face. What is all this guck? Then the only thing that I can think about is, How many people get cremated in New York City every day? Is this them floating around and sticking to my face?

  * * *

  —

  Then, I’m about halfway done with the wall and the downstairs neighbor tells me that he has a crack in his wall. Do I know what I’m doing?

  Well, obviously no.

  I hire someone to come and look at the wall and tell me if it is structural. He tells me no, it isn’t, but a couple of days later there is a report that there is a crack that is going down from my place on the third floor all the way to the first floor apartment.

  I am very stoned. I am destroying an entire building.

  I began to freak out. Francie said, “Five years from now this won’t mean anything to you, you’ll look back and laugh.”

  I could not imagine this to be true, but it absolutely turned out to be.

  * * *

  —

  Tom moved into the apartment. Nice, smart little gay man from Provincetown. Rick and Francie’s friend. I cleaned up the wall a bit and then just tried to ignore it.

  Tom had tons of Quaaludes. I loved them. All my anxiety and self-hatred dropped away, and although they were supposed to be a downer, they gave me energy. They were perfect. I only allowed myself to take them once a week or on special occasions in between.

  Watching our little black and white TV, we discovered this show that was on at four a.m., The Jeanne Parr Show. Jeanne Parr was six foot two, with a bouffant of blond hair. She hosted a type of show that was a sort of precursor to Jerry Springer. She discussed controversial subjects like, “Should gays be allowed to teach in grade school?” Jeanne Parr was a reactionary and quite strange. Her guests were usually bizarre. For example, for the gay teacher one, she had a gay teacher and a bald guy who had nothing to say except to scream at the top of his lungs, spitting, “I won’t allow it! I won’t allow it!” Then Jeanne would go out into the audience and interview them about what they thought. Tom and I would smoke pot and laugh hysterically. We even reenacted our favorite scenes from the show, with Jimmy Jenkins, by tape-recording it and then learning the lines. Then we would make our own tape recording of the scenes with Tom and Jimmy playing Jeanne Parr and the women guests, and me, in different voices, playing the men.

  I wonder where those tapes are.

  The show was on live at noon and then the same episode repeated at four a.m.

  Tom said, in his delighted, quippy voice, “We should go down there. We should go down and be in the audience, they’ll think we’re wonderful and ask us all the questions.”

  So a troop of us in sunglasses and white shirts would go down and be in the audience as often as we could get up by eleven a.m. When the camera panned across the audience we would all be there waving blenders and pineapples or whatever else we had collected on Fifty-seventh Street, yelling things like, “Aardvark! Aardvark!” Later that night we would smoke more pot and proudly watch ourselves on TV.

  Eventually, they let us know that we were not welcome. It took them a while before they mustered the nerve to ban us from the show, but then they did. Tom did get asked a question once. It was a great success.

  My apartment on Third Street came through.

  8

  Men in Orbit

  I moved into an apartment on East Third Street in 1977. Government-run railroad apartments for $55 a month. I suppose for some people it would have been a drawback having the men’s shelter directly across the street, but it didn’t bother me. I felt a certain kinship with these people who had chosen to or couldn’t help but live outside of a hopeless society.

  The building was full of characters. Besides Eric Mitchell, who lived above me, and the porn star couple on the top floor, everyone else was, like myself, government-certified insane. At that time I was still living on Supplemental Security Income.

  Demi Demme, the guy on the first floor, wore an eye patch and had long, matted hair with a little beard. He was skinny and nervous. Usually he was pleasant, but on more than one occasion he would curse and hiss at me in the hallway like I was responsible for the downfall of his people.

  One night he came up to my place on the third floor and pounded on the door.

  “John, John, come here. You’ve got to come to my place.” He was very excited. I thought it was an emergency.

  “What’s wrong, Demi?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. You just have to come downstairs.”

  I said I didn’t really want to. But he started pulling on my arm, yelling, “Come on! Come on!”

  He opened the door to his apartment. It was set up like my place with a tub in the kitchen. Standing in the tub was a plump, naked blond girl, ankle-deep in water. She was about twenty-two or twenty-three years old. She wasn’t moving, she was just standing there, in profile, with her glasses on.

  Demi looked at her and clapped his hands. She didn’t say anything but glanced at me for a moment. Then Demi jumped in the air, giggled, and clapped his hands again.


  This did not seem like a sexual encounter. I don’t know what it was. It was more like a viewing. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, so I shrugged and thanked him, and told him I had to go back upstairs.

  Across the hall was Hannah. She’d been a normal, middle class housewife, married to an accountant or something in Connecticut or somewhere. Then she had taken LSD, or lots of LSD, and her life had gone on a little detour. Now she lived alone in the East Village, saw words on her forehead, and made poems out of them.

  Years later, I was in a used book store and actually saw her book. There was a picture of Hannah’s pleasant, loppy face beaming out from the cover. Written on her forehead in crayon was, “I See Words on My Forehead.” I wonder how many copies were sold.

  She started having a problem with her hearing and got it in her head that my playing the saxophone was making it worse. I have a tape somewhere of my playing this beautiful, soft, fragmented melody while Hannah pounded on my door shrieking, “John, stop hurting people with your music! Stop hurting people with your music!” She started wearing a headband around her ears. She even threatened to report me.

  Back then, because my SSI benefits were not enough, I was doing a lot of petty crime, dealing pot, traveler’s check scams, a bunch of stuff. When I moved into Third Street I got this cheap insurance because the block was so unsafe.

  I got the idea to steal my own horns and collect the insurance. I locked my door and went out into the hallway with a hammer and a crowbar. I couldn’t believe how difficult it was to break into my own apartment. I was out there flailing away with the hammer and crowbar, making a racket, when I sensed something and I stopped. It was the porn stars on their way upstairs. I stood there like a fool with the crowbar cocked over my head.