The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  “What are you doing, John?”

  “Uh, I locked myself out.”

  “Do you want to come to our place and go down the fire escape?”

  “Um, no thank you, I’m almost finished.”

  I could sense Hannah watching me through her peephole and scurrying away every time I looked at her door. Somehow she figured it out, maybe when the insurance adjusters came. These poor guys. I had prepared an elaborate story for them, but they took one look at my block, were terrified, and no explanation was necessary. They wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. They looked like they were about to break out into a dash. They approved the claim.

  * * *

  —

  Through the ceiling, at all hours, I could hear the minotaur clomping of Eric Mitchell. His rotting wooden floors had no carpet. He was working on Super 8 films that he shot in his apartment, one after the other, like Fassbinder. He would pace back and forth furiously as he worked out ideas in his head.

  His apartment was barren and painted all one color: gray. He slept on an army cot. He had found a rusted industrial clothes rack on the street, which acted as a closet. I loved the idea and found one for myself. He threw the butts from the cigarettes he bummed from me into his kitchen sink, making an unsightly mess, but his apartment, in general, was spotless. Like an army barracks in an impoverished country.

  He would come down to my apartment and I would play the guitar while he would sing stories that he made up on the spot, sometimes with an empty bucket on his head.

  He was French, with a thick, bizarre accent that felt more like he was from Romania. For about eight seconds Eric had been a punk movie star in an Amos Poe film. He was connected up to things that seemed exciting—the punk, anti-art world. He knew all these smart, interesting oddballs, who appeared to be living uniquely on a ferocious edge: Richard Hell, Arto Lindsay, James Chance, Alan Vega, James Nares, Tina L’Hotsky, Pat Place, Patti Astor, Steve Kramer, and tons more who were just fascinating. No bullshit. I had never seen anything like it. This was a tough artist community that I had to be part of, and I followed Eric around like a sidekick.

  * * *

  —

  We found a crate of giant rotting avocados on the West Side Highway. I took half the avocados and worked my way through the traffic to the other side of the street. Then we had a war. Hurling avocados at each other over the speeding cars. Eric was French and I had a good arm, so I pulverized him. Splatting rancid green avocado bombs all over his pants.

  On the corner of Fourth Street and Second Avenue, a storefront opened up that sold ice cream. There was a banner outside that said, “Free Ice Cream Cones.” We both ordered cones and started eating them. The guy behind the counter said, “Two dollars.”

  “But the sign outside says they’re free.”

  “That was yesterday.”

  “Well, then you have to take the sign down.”

  The guy shrugs and says, “No ladder today.”

  Eric, who was incredibly tight with money, plopped down $2. I was shocked that he was paying for me. He laughed that infectious laugh and slammed the ice cream cone into the middle of his forehead. He just let it stick there as he walked out of the store, making a sound like he was drowning as he inhaled his laugh.

  * * *

  —

  Twenty-third near Eighth Avenue, where there is now a multiplex movie theater, used to be the home of Squat Theatre, a Hungarian theater troupe who had been exiled from their home country for their wild performances filled with political outrage and humor.

  Everybody was talking about this exciting new group. They all lived upstairs, sprawlingly, in this fairly large building on Twenty-third Street. They did their theater pieces on the ground floor, which had a huge picture window out onto the street. Passersby outside became the backdrop to the play.

  I thought they were brave and interesting and went upstairs into their kitchen to hang out with them. Everything was very matter of fact with them. Peter Halasz, who, in a way, seemed to be their leader, sat at an enormous grungy dining table cutting into a raw onion with a sharp knife and eating it, like it was an apple. He beat me in a game of chess.

  I went back a couple of days later to ask if I could perhaps use their theater one night. They talked about it for a second, surveyed me, and then said yes. They had not let anyone use their theater previously. It was nice to be surveyed and approved like that.

  I could have the theater for one night in August. I started to work immediately.

  As a form of exercise, I used to do Rocky Colavito stretching with a baseball bat. Then swing the bat back and forth in rhythm, over and over again, as fast as I could. I decided to extend a little farther for the second section of the performance, entitled Fear Strikes Out, in honor of the baseball player Jimmy Piersall. He was a bipolar baseball player who had a nervous breakdown and did all kinds of unusual things on the field before being institutionalized for a spell.

  I went to Rick’s place on Third Street with my tape recorder and made a recording of several layers of static on his broken TV and broken radio. I swung the volume up and down and created the music for Fear Strikes Out, a roaring symphony of whooshing.

  For the performance, instead of a baseball bat I used a wooden curtain rod that I shaped to look like a baseball bat because it was easier to swing faster and longer as the static sped up, and then finally just became a white roar, while I danced and flailed wildly about.

  The first part was called “Baby” and was just me softly playing the soprano saxophone.

  The third part was “Anthem,” which was me playing the alto over the sound of smashing glass.

  I went over to the abandoned dock buildings, on the West Side, at five in the morning with my tape recorder. I took every large sheet of glass out of every window and brought them to a large, empty concrete room, up on the second floor.

  I turned on the tape recorder and started to smash the sheets of glass in the middle of the room. I wanted this part to be about fifteen minutes and had a stopwatch on top of the tape recorder. It is difficult to calculate the time that has gone by as you are smashing giant sheets of glass in a concrete room.

  As I was getting to the end of the sheets of glass, I could just see the stopwatch and that it showed only ten minutes had gone by. So after the last seven-foot window was smashed, I ran into the pile of broken glass, picked up two of the largest pieces left, and dragged them in a circle along the cement floor, in the middle of the field of broken glass. It created a hellacious sound.

  My arms were bleeding everywhere as I headed home, proudly, amid the morning traffic.

  Between the second and third acts, I ran offstage, where Julie Hanlon waited with clippers and a line of coke. Julie shaved my head as fast as she could, leaving odd rows of misshapen hair. I’m not sure why I did this, other than to prove my commitment.

  The smashing glass was used as bass and drums behind this major melody that I played on the alto. I loved that melody. It later became a Lounge Lizards song called “Party in Your Mouth,” which we never recorded.

  Someone swung the spotlight from me to the audience to mimic the earlier swinging of the bat. Evan and Rick and a few other people in the packed house were instructed to start screaming about eight minutes into the smashing-glass section, which they did. Then the whole audience began to scream.

  The piece had a number of different titles but was finally called Leukemia, probably not the best choice. But it was for my father, who had had leukemia when I was very young, which then magically disappeared.

  The posters said, “Leukemia by one boy,” with the address and date.

  The piece, though youthful and silly in a way, was a success for me. All the parts worked, it was certainly powerful, and the feedback was fantastic. It was the first thing that I had done in front of an audience that had worked. And it w
as the first thing I had done in New York.

  I celebrated with my friends and then went back to Third Street, where Eric Mitchell was finishing the one-night shoot of his movie Kidnapped. I went upstairs, all excited and wired, and Eric was exceedingly unfriendly.

  “That’s great, John,” he said sarcastically, but it hardly fazed me.

  I had done something great.

  * * *

  —

  In the summer of ’78, a group of us—James Nares, Becky Johnston, Michael McClard, myself, and Eric—all made Super 8 movies. Everybody acted and worked on each other’s films. They cost five hundred to a thousand dollars, and most of the money was raised by crime. Eric was the driving force behind all of this. Then he got money from Michael Zilkha for an Advent projector and opened a storefront on St. Marks Place called the New Cinema. He wanted me to make a film for it.

  I had already made one film in Super 8 called Hell Is You, which was me interviewing James Chance from the Contortions, with a ridiculous grin on my face the entire time. Trying to emulate some combination of Joe Franklin and Tom Snyder.

  I asked James incredibly inane questions as he played a sort of a famous woman punk singer. But the highlight of the film was a three-minute version of The African Queen, where I was Humphrey Bogart and James was the leeches who attacked me every time I got out of the boat, which was a cracked full length mirror on the floor. If you are thinking, Oh, I would like to see this, let me suggest that you probably wouldn’t.

  There used to be this great place on Stanton or Rivington called Young Filmmakers, and if you could put down a deposit equal to the value of the equipment, they would loan you cameras and mics and lights, then give you back your deposit if you returned the equipment undamaged.

  What I had wanted to do was a movie with Jack Smith, where James Chance and Christopher Knowles are his sons and they go on a road trip. These were, by far, the most compelling people I had encountered since coming to New York.

  Christopher Knowles was the autistic kid in several Robert Wilson pieces around that time. He also wrote a lot of dialogue for things like Einstein on the Beach. “If I could get some wind for the sailboat.” “Windbreakers. Windbreakers. That’s where it’s at! Windbreakers!”

  I went to a workshop where he was featured and he stayed out of the room. At the end he came running out with this enormous roll of graph paper. He unrolled it on the floor and it went out over forty feet. It had a red line down the middle that he had drawn with a crayon.

  This was majestic in and of itself. But then he announced, quite loudly, “The red line is the airplane line.” Then went back to his room.

  This kid was something else. A true artist who lived in it.

  I wanted him badly for the film, but he was a teenager and had people who handled him. Perhaps that is unfair and they actually cared for him but it felt more to me like they coveted him as an artistic force with a great deal of value.

  Smith, if you do not know who he is, is hard to describe. You could look him up. His movie Flaming Creatures was a big influence on Warhol and John Waters.

  But that was not why I was so interested in him. Much like Christopher Knowles, it was the wondrous, magical world that Jack Smith seemed to inhabit at all times.

  I first became aware of him when he was with Henry Flynt and his Brend project. I saw photos of them where they were standing outside the Museum of Modern Art wearing sandwich board signs that said, “BOYCOTT ART.” I fucking loved it.

  Richard Morrison took me to see a play Jack Smith was doing in a loft on Broadway near Thirteenth Street. I wonder now if this was Rafik’s place.

  That play was what really hit me about Jack Smith.

  There were just a handful of people there, in fold-out chairs. There was some odd music that I believe was from a Maria Montez movie that was almost like Egyptian Muzak. Very slow melody that was almost campy. It played on a record player, which Smith would go over to and carefully pick up the needle and start it in another spot.

  The play never started. It was Smith amid a bunch of props—plastic flowers, plastic flamingos, some colorful vases, a table with the record player. He was wearing a robe and a turban, which he took off and put back on from time to time.

  Smith would carefully, with much consideration, move the props from one place to another. Then go back and stand over the record player and try to pick up the needle without scratching the record. It often took quite a bit of time.

  It was mesmerizing. I know it doesn’t sound like it, and even as I think back to it I wonder how it was so fascinating, but it was. I can say that when I think back to it, it is etched in my memory stronger than almost any other performance I have ever seen.

  Getting Jack Smith, Christopher Knowles, and James Chance in one place was impossible. I doubt anyone could have pulled it off. No matter how much money or power or will one had.

  I got Jack Smith’s address and was told that he was open to visitors. I went over to his place on the East Side. There were a couple of people there. He wasn’t interacting with them. He was painting a tiny corner of his apartment.

  His place was decorated as a mad, plastic, tropical paradise. He had painted the walls in tiny blotches of turquoise and green and yellow. There were plastic flowers everywhere. I want to say there was a stuffed boar’s head hanging off the ceiling, but I am not sure if that is true. It just felt like that.

  He was pretty cantankerous, rude to people, but if you brought him some marijuana he would be much nicer.

  I went by a few times. He would be carefully plastering in some little corner, adding just the tiniest amount of plaster until he felt it was perfect. He explained that he had to work constantly because it made him feel cleaner. Less guilty. He seemed to like me and would confide in me. Then a moment later he would be snarling at my stupidity. And as I was twenty-four and said a lot of stupid things, he was probably fairly accurate.

  I ask if I could film him. He asks if I have a script. I say that I have one, with him driving in a car with James Chance and Christopher Knowles as his sons, but that project has fallen through.

  He agrees to do a film with me. But every time someone stops in, he says in snide tones, “This guy wants to make a film with me. He doesn’t have a script.”

  So it is set up that I will come by his place around five the next day. I get there and he is doing his normal…I want to call it puttering, but that would be an injustice to it. It is puttering, but there is something magical to it.

  He takes forever to pull together the things he wants and we go up on the roof.

  He takes a blanket and puts it down to crouch on but wraps half of it around his body. He moves a couple of his props.

  He rearranges the blanket over his shoulders.

  He rearranges the blanket again.

  I start to film.

  He screams at me, “Don’t film now!” So I wait for a bit as he moves things around. But I am thinking, Shit, the most compelling thing I know about this guy is the performance where he tries to set things up and never gets started. I should film this. It is fascinating.

  He screams at me again, “Don’t film now! You are wasting film!”

  Then it dawns on me…he is fucking with me. He is going to wait until it gets completely dark and then say, Okay, you can film now.

  And fair enough, as I think back on it. I have been in this situation many times in my life: Some young “artist” approaches me about doing something where they have nothing—zero—to offer into the mix. The rationale is, I am an artistic person like yourself. I have never actually done anything but I have artistic feelings, so I would like to use you.

  But they don’t bring anything to the table. Nothing. And then expect you to donate your time and talent to their unformed project, and they are vindicated in this because they have artistic feelings. It is parasitic.
/>   I start to film again. He screams, “You are wasting film!”

  I say, “It will be dark in a minute. Let me film.”

  He doesn’t respond as he rolls the blanket one way and then the other.

  I start filming again.

  He screams again.

  I finally just started shooting into the air at this point. It was dark.

  I was yelling, “Waste of film! Waste of film!”

  He jumped up from the blanket and came charging at me.

  I dodged him, laughing, and kept shooting in the air, yelling, “Waste of film! Waste of film!”

  My basketball skills were finally coming to some use. I swear he would have killed me if he had caught me.

  I finally went running down the stairs, laughing, with him charging after me. “Waste of film! Waste of film!”

  * * *

  —

  So Eric wanted me to make a film and I explained that I had no money to make a film.

  “It’s easy. I’ll show you. Come on.”

  He gave me his driver’s license and told me to start practicing forging his signature. At that time, the New York State driver’s license didn’t have a photo. It was just a card with a signature. After a couple of days, he came down and inspected piles of scraps of paper, on my desk, with his name scrawled on them.

  “Okay, this is good enough.”

  Eric went out and bought a thousand dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks. He thought I didn’t look straight enough, so he made me wear his penny loafers that were three sizes too small.

  I waddled into bank after bank cashing Eric’s checks, in one hundred dollar amounts, by writing his name at the bottom, while he waited impatiently outside. I couldn’t sign his signature quickly, so I would sign them at the glass desk that holds deposit slips and then walk up to the teller and pretend to sign them there.