by John Lurie
* * *
—
Willie Mays invited María and me over to his house. He painted my portrait, made me look like Simon Bar Sinister. While he was painting, Willie and I took tons of coke. María didn’t take drugs.
María was completely taken with how much money Jean-Michel had. Was in awe of it. That bothered me, seemed cheap, and he was playing into it.
The heroin I had taken earlier started to wear off and the coke was making me feel really creepy. Jean-Michel didn’t take heroin then. Scoffed at me about it. He took lots of coke and smoked weed so strong it would have killed Bob Marley. He could read me really well and knew the cocaine was starting to make me uncomfortable. And he kept pouring out more and more.
He gave the painting to María. This was definitely a poke at me. He knew that I was hurting for money, that María was taken with his newfound wealth, and that this thing he had just whipped off was going to be worth, at that time, at least ten thousand. Of course, now it has to be worth maybe a million.
He most certainly had a cruel streak. But more than anything, we were just so competitive all the time. I have never been competitive like that with anyone else, before or since. We loved each other like brothers, but whenever I showed any weakness, it disgusted him. Maybe it stemmed from disappointment, his hero losing his spine.
* * *
—
Things began getting grim. People started dying. Many were very sick or had died from what at the time was called the Gay Cancer. People were OD’ing. People died in car accidents. People fell out of windows.
For real, Martin Futant had died when he fell out a window while trying to steal a typewriter. All the girls competed in their grief by counting the number of times they had slept with him.
What had been a year or two of the most relentless fun ever on planet Earth was no longer that. The urgency and impunity were gone. Things suddenly felt dangerous.
The drugs weren’t doing me any good. At all. Most people were just getting high all the time and living the junkie life, but I kept kicking, over and over. I wouldn’t let myself go more than two or three days in a row. So I was spending half my life kicking.
When Thelonious Monk died, I was kicking heroin for the fiftieth time on my little mattress on Third Street, watching my black and white TV on the floor. I was really upset that the news was all about Lee Strasberg, who had died on the same day, and not about Monk. Our culture weighing the importance of things in a very wrong way.
Any news station that even mentioned Monk at all only did so like he was some insane cartoon character of jazz.
That night around seven, Teo Macero called me to ask if I would go to Monk’s funeral with him the next day. He really wanted me to go. But the only way I could have gone was to get high or I would have been too sick to go. But to take heroin to get straight enough to make it to Monk’s funeral was desperately pathetic and disrespectful. I couldn’t do it. And I told Teo I couldn’t go.
If I have made drugs seem glamorous at any time in this book, which they can be from time to time…if you can’t make it to Thelonious Monk’s funeral because of your heroin problem, you are a pathetic loser.
Now I wasn’t the coolest guy in town anymore. That was last year. As I tried to make the music better, to get closer to the concept I had always had, it seemed to get worse. This was immediately seen as uncool. Faster than my star was plummeting, Jean-Michel’s was rising. He skyrocketed past me in a second and sailed by. Suddenly his hero, me, was someone to look down on in disgust. Danny Rosen, another member of the John Lurie School of Bohemian Living, who at one time had also gazed up at me with abandon, now sneered at me along with Jean-Michel.
And I was poor. Really poor. And now to be a poor artist was not cool. Just like that, money was the thing, and Jean-Michel had tons of it. You would go over to his place and there would be stacks of hundred dollar bills lying everywhere. Flaunt it, why don’t you?
* * *
—
Jean-Michel and Torton were poking at me and I got pissed. Said, “The fact that you are actually a great painter has nothing to do with your success. These people don’t even see your stuff. It’s because you’re black and handsome and your name is Jean-Michel and you were a poor graffiti artist at exactly the right moment. It’s a fluke that you actually are good, but you being good has nothing to do with this success you’re having.
“You have great promise. You are a true artist, you can’t help but be an artist, but if you keep getting lost in this fashion parade you aren’t going to get there.”
He snapped back, “Anyone who works as hard as I do would make as much money as me. I work really hard.”
I’m sure I said something equally stupid in return. But we had big fights; he started surrounding himself with an entourage who told him his every thought was genius, and I was not having it. The stacks of hundred dollar bills were constantly being nibbled on by his idolaters.
Like I said, we were really competitive. I loved him. And he loved me. But we were always fighting, and really he had more power than I did. And he had that go for the jugular thing, where if he saw that I was insecure he would eat me alive. When he was in trouble, he would fly to me in a second, begging for help. And I would always let him off the hook and look after him.
* * *
—
A couple weeks later, the night before his first big show, he calls me at three in the morning. He’s crying, he has to come over. So he comes to Third Street and he has been snorting so much coke that his nose is bleeding. He’s terrified because his father is coming to his opening tomorrow. I don’t know exactly what their relationship is, but it’s some twisted shit. And you know that that weird voodoo power Jean-Michel has is most likely, through fatherhood, even more potent in his dad.
Willie Mays is crying and crying. He is terrified. I’m not sure if he’s afraid his father won’t like his paintings or will somehow take from him, or if his father being there might expose him somehow to an art world that up to that point has found him to be just the perfect evil little darling.
Then, at the party after the show, he’s all fine and smiling.
Jean-Michel gives Torton a couple hundred bucks to act as a bouncer. He wants Steve Kaplan kept out of the party because he’d insulted his work.
* * *
—
A couple of days later I flew down to Cozumel. I was about to turn thirty and I wanted to kick dope, once and for all, before I did. With the sun and the water, I was actually fine the first couple of days and thought that I might get through okay. The other side of the island was deserted, and I would ride over there on a motorcycle and watch the giant iguanas. I was going through a roundabout when I skidded on sand and went down. My leg was all scraped up. Every missing endorphin raged a complaint. I was not so much hurt from the crash as immediately overcome by dope sickness. Spent a day in my room, shaking, staring at the ceiling.
Dope sickness is amazing because you can’t even really just lie there. The parts of your body that are touching the bed hurt from the contact. Your hair hurts.
I finally was able to get up and go a half block away to get some food, from a not particularly hygienic looking café. I got food poisoning. Puked my guts up for another day and a half, and when I came out the other side I was okay.
I moved to the deserted side of the island. A cheap row of tiny concrete rooms. Otherwise there was absolutely nothing on that side of the island, except for hundreds of huge iguanas.
* * *
—
I’m there on the beach, have the whole beach to myself—just me and the iguanas and the crashing waves. When this woman comes walking toward me. She is someone I know from New York. Actually she is not someone I know, she is someone I barely know who has leered at me from time to time. I don’t know how she knew that I was going to be in Cozumel. I keep asking her
how she knew but she just smiles coyly and will not answer.
Much more incredible is how she found me on the deserted side of the island.
People think celebrities are aloof and insulated, but often it isn’t because they are assholes but because they have no choice. There is something really terrifying about these superfans who do not see you as a person, only something that lives inside their mind but moves around in the flesh from time to time.
No matter how hard you try to treat them as human beings, they do not return it. They just burrow into you like a parasite.
Every time I’d met her, she announced that her name was no longer the last name that I’d known her by, which I didn’t remember in the first place, but now it was something else. So I have no idea what to name her here. Sally? Anna? Valerie? Sue? Table? Porcupine? Porcupine, I guess.
Porcupine suggests a deal, that I accompany her to the ruins. She is nervous to travel in Mexico alone. After that I can keep her car when she goes back.
I don’t have a credit card and I can’t rent a car, so I take her up on this so I can drive down to Belize.
I spend a day or so with Porcupine Table and then put her on a bus back to Cancún. Then I drive around in the jungle and get lost. After a few hours, I hit a clearing and there are people everywhere. Right in the jungle. Film crews, vendors, busloads of tourists. I have stumbled onto the Mayan ruin of Chichen Itza and it is the day that the sun casts a giant shadow of a serpent across this long football field of very green grass.
* * *
—
But something is wrong here in my memory. I think that the serpent comes out on the first day of spring, and this trip ends in about a week, on my thirtieth birthday. How can this be the first day of spring if my thirtieth birthday is December 14? Oh well.
I am somewhere near Tulum and get a bungalow for the night. I read that there is a ruin near the hotel and go there in the morning. It is really a towering thing, and I climb and climb the stone steps, out of breath, to the top. When I get to the top platform, with jungle spread out all around beneath me, there are two other people at the top. It kind of wrecks it not to be alone up there and I stand on the other side, away from them.
“Hey, John!”
That is weird. No one can possibly be yelling out to me, here in the absolute middle of nowhere jungle.
I turn to see that it’s Jeffrey Cantor, the very sweet guy from Young Filmmakers who loaned me his motorcycle helmet for Men in Orbit. And he’s with Rhonda Ronin, who is a good friend of Richard Morrison’s. These people could not possibly know each other. Rhonda is wild and a sexy, two-fisted drinker, and Jeffrey is quiet and sweet. They are just from different worlds. It’s odd enough that they’re together, never mind that I should run into them on top of this tower in the jungle.
We have an awkward conversation and then they head back down. I continue on my way to Belize. There are warnings all over the rental car papers that say that one cannot take the car into Belize, that you will not be allowed to come through customs, but when I get to the border they look me over and wave me through. On the other side of customs there are groups of guys flagging down my car. I think that they are official and roll down the window.
“Mister, you want to sell this car?”
“It’s not mine, it’s a rental.”
“Yes, I know. You say is stolen from you.”
He tells me to meet him after dark at this park along the water. I go, but it is deserted and feels not so safe, so I drive away.
I spend the night at a hotel that has a three-inch-long water bug on the bedcovers. I lift up the sheets to discover his cousin.
* * *
—
In the morning, I look at the map. Belize City doesn’t look so far, at least not by miles. What is not clear is that, at least at this time, these are not really roads. They are trails. Miles and miles of muddy trails, with big patches of water, fallen trees, and rocks. Vegetation grows out onto the road, determined to reclaim it. I am driving a little stick shift car not meant for anything like this kind of travel.
I am driving for hours through the jungle. Lots of birds, armadillos, anteaters all over the place. I get to a clearing, I think it was Orange Walk, and a soccer game is taking place in a field with what seems to be the whole village watching.
They see me in the car clumping along and someone yells, “White Man! White Man!” Everyone starts pointing and yelling, “White Man!” and they all start to run toward the car. I speed up and bounce out of there. They may have just been intrigued; maybe I am the first white man they have ever seen. It did feel kind of like that, but I didn’t want to wait to find out.
I drive through the night and arrive in Belize City the next afternoon. Stay in a filthy bed and breakfast with a bunch of American expatriates who all seem to be hiding from the law.
A guy, with long dreads, on the street whispers to me, “What you need, man?” I ask for opium, thinking surely he can’t get any.
“You wait here.”
“I don’t want to wait here.”
“Where you staying?”
I tell him.
“I come tonight, at eight, meet me outside.”
At eight p.m. he is sticking his head out from around the corner, waving at me to come. I go out and he says to come with him. He leads me somewhere, goes inside, comes back, and is all flustered.
This is all starting to take forever. He takes me to a downtown area and tells me to wait here at the corner. Forty-five minutes later he returns and stretches his cupped hand out toward me.
I take what he has concealed. It is a vial that says “Omnopon.”
“What’s this?”
“Omnopon.”
“What’s Omnopon? I don’t want that. I wanted opium.”
“Yes, I already pay.”
“How much?”
“Ten dollars.”
It sounds like a question. I give him five and let him keep the vial.
Have one lovely day snorkeling with a group of wacko Americans at the island of Caye Caulker, where we are devoured by mosquitoes at night in a little hut.
Mostly, though, Belize just seems to be teeming with criminals, and I have my horn and can never leave it anywhere and feel safe, so I decide to drive back.
It takes thirty-six hours to drive back to Cancún, where I have to drop the car off. I don’t really know how to drive a stick, and the transmission is getting fucked up from the roads that are not really roads. There is wildlife everywhere, mostly anteaters. Anteaters. Anteaters. And I am deliriously tired. Anteaters. Thirty-six hours later, I leave the car, with its transmission dangling on the pavement, in the parking lot of the rental car office.
It is my thirtieth birthday. I sit on the beach watching the sun go down. I am very, very sad but not sure exactly why.
* * *
—
I got back to New York and Torton was working for Jean-Michel. Doing the same kind of thing he had done for free for me, but now he was getting five hundred a week. I felt a bit betrayed. Stephen had given me a sense of buoyancy that was wonderful. I really couldn’t blame him for working for Jean-Michel, but they were starting to gang up on me and were making me even more insecure than I had become.
“You’re not so great. In fact, you’re a bit of a joke, aren’t you?” Which for a moment really was turning me into a bit of a joke.
I was pissed. Got high a bunch with Gabrielle. She had a bunch of art supplies and I would draw while she would do other stuff at the end of her loft. I would get so into drawing that when I would look up at the clock, five hours would have gone by.
Gabrielle came to my end of the loft after watching the news.
“It is so cold in Alaska that when people exhale, their breath crystallizes and falls to the ground.”
I was drawing and
not really listening. “Yeah?”
“It must be really loud there.”
Gabrielle was one of the funniest people I have ever met.
I bought a rubber ball for twenty-five cents and was walking around New York bouncing it off buildings. Really depressed.
Jean-Michel and I were sleeping with a lot of the same girls. Wayward model types. I was walking by his place and buzzed the buzzer. This girl I had almost been with a month before came to the second floor window and yelled out, “He is very busy. You can’t come up.” She didn’t even say hello.
When she closed the window, I threw the ball up and hit it, really hard. The glass was still wobbling when Jean-Michel came barreling out of his front door with his chest out.
He wanted to fight. I wanted to fight. We stood about fifteen feet apart from each other without saying a word. Then he turned and went back inside. Stephen watched from the window.
Willie Mays and I almost got in fist fights a bunch of different times, but one or the other was always too high or too depressed.
So we decided to have a boxing match. We were both really excited about the idea. We’d go into training, and I was most excited about making the fight card. We could make an actual fight card with us both staring out, wearing Everlast shorts. A couple of years later he took the idea and used it with Andy Warhol for a combined painting show they did. I was not pleased at all about that.
* * *
—
The band went on the Bruno “You Cats!” Denger tour. Got stiffed and went home. Of course, Tony and I never slept. The last show was in Switzerland, where Bruno lived. He gave us the keys to the van and asked if we minded just driving ourselves to the airport and dropping off the van there.
