The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  “Driving is a privilege. I am not obligated to give you another license. It is up to my judgment.”

  I said something like, “What the fuck?” and the next thing I knew I was being escorted out by two large men who told me not to come back.

  I went home and my mom asked if I’d gotten the license. We had already argued about her washing my pants.

  “No, they threw me out.”

  “What do you mean they threw you out?”

  “I swore and this tubby bureaucrat had me thrown out.”

  “So you don’t have a license? They can’t do that, I’m going down there myself.”

  So my mom went down to the Registry of Motor Vehicles in an indignant huff. They threw her out too.

  On the Welsh death certificate the cause of death was listed as alcoholism. Didn’t sound very official or even medically correct. Not liver failure or whatever else. Just “Cause of death—alcoholism.” That upset me for some reason, like it was a judgment.

  Well, she drank so much that she died. Must have deserved it.

  I had taken my horn with me but I hadn’t played it in a couple of weeks. When I finally took it out to play, I expected it to be the most beautiful, lamenting melody. Something I wouldn’t think about that would come directly from my depths and appear as music. I put the horn together and blew into it.

  What came out just sounded ill.

  * * *

  —

  She was cremated. We had a tree planted on the other side of the Menai Strait, off in the woods in a sanctuary. We took the ashes out to that spot to scatter them. Ev and Liz scattered some gently, and then I took the urn and jolted the ashes up to the sky. The white powder shot up, a lot of it, more than I thought, and then hung there in the air against the sky and floated.

  17

  Fifty Million Junkies Can’t All Be Wrong

  The time I spent attempting to find my soul and its place in the universe, that period covered a span of almost seven years; the drug period was roughly the same, less even, yet the amount of space the spiritual part takes up in this book is almost nothing in comparison to the drug days. A journey inward has less tellable tales. In music or painting I can maybe do it, but not in writing.

  Unless you are Rumi or Lao-tzu, descriptions of journeys of the spirit perhaps should be left alone.

  And one week of drugs leads to twice as many stories as a lifetime in a monastery.

  Heroin is a predator. A barracuda.

  Heroin goes out of its way to find you.

  Once I had spent three days kicking in my place on Third Street and finally had my legs back enough to venture out and pick up some food. I get to the bottom of the stairs, outside, and there is this guy there I barely know—I just know him from nightclubs—and he says, “Hey, John, you want a bag of dope?”

  I mean, this doesn’t happen. Ever. No one offers you a free bag of heroin.

  People who say “Just stop taking drugs” do not have a clue. It’s an asshole thing to say. It is like saying “From now on you will not piss.” At some point you absolutely cannot bear it any longer.

  You have to trick the heroin away. And your own mind lies to you about it.

  I didn’t want to take dope anymore, but it just seemed to be everywhere.

  Piccolo had recommended an acupuncturist named Danny Dunphy to help me kick. Danny was working at the Atkins Diet place and he would sneak me in a side door. This place was a hell of a lot nicer than the community-run acupuncture place that I had been to in the Bronx. A hundred skeevy-looking junkies, sitting around this giant room with a high rotting ceiling, all with acupuncture needles sticking out of their ears. No one spoke as they sat in the broken chairs.

  Danny knew some stuff, but he was also experimenting on me. Once he injected me with this big syringe of red-orange liquid that I suppose was vitamins, but it just rocked me. I felt on the verge of having a seizure.

  He gave me this stuff called Perfect 7 that cleared my bowels out. Opiates make one very constipated. My shit was just these tiny, hard rabbit pellets. After a couple of days taking this horrible tasting stuff, I had a trip to the bathroom that produced a two and a half foot long, perfect stool, all impressively in one piece, in the shape of my colon. I wanted to call people and have them come over for a viewing. A remarkable thing it was.

  One thing he gave me that really helped me was one hundred grams of vitamin C intravenously over three or four hours. This works. It blocks out the dope sickness. Your eyes stop burning, your nose stops running, the pain isn’t as bad. It amazes me that this isn’t common knowledge.

  * * *

  —

  I used to freebase cocaine with the bass player Sirone, born Norris Jones. Sirone was part of an extremely muscular, modern jazz trio called the Revolutionary Ensemble.

  Jerome Cooper on drums, Leroy Jenkins on violin, and Sirone on acoustic bass. Evan and I used to listen to their records in the midseventies and hoped that they really might forge new territory for jazz.

  Back in 1977, I went to see them at Lincoln Center. They were the first of three bands and they were wild compared to the more normal, geriatric or frighteningly academic groups that usually got booked at jazz festivals in the United States at that time.

  I don’t think it went well for them. They tried to do the show acoustically because they were playing at Lincoln Center, where the acoustics would theoretically work for their instruments, but the sound was small and didn’t have the power that was required to achieve the ferocity that I’d heard them play with before.

  I don’t remember who the second and third bands were, but I got bored and walked out. As I was leaving, I ran smack into Sirone. For me, at that time, this was kind of like I was seven years old and bumped into Mickey Mantle, accidentally, all by himself outside Yankee Stadium, carrying a baseball bat and glove.

  I told him how much I admired his group. He gave me a big thank you that sounded completely disingenuous and like he had thrown out this thank you, with nothing behind it, a thousand times before.

  We ended up taking a cab downtown as he grumbled complaints to himself that I didn’t really catch, but he felt the gig had gone terribly and was blaming someone for it.

  I was dealing the pot fronted to me by Vance back then. I used to go over to Sirone’s and we would play. It was more along the lines of teacher-student than two musicians jamming.

  Sirone was always scamming something. Always running to the pawnshop or trying to get in the middle of a drug deal or scam a grant—anything. He was always hard at work chasing something that didn’t really make any sense and never amounted to anything. One thing that always shocked me when I first got to New York was how these musicians, who were known and respected, with actual recordings in the stores, were usually broke and trying desperately to make ends meet and still do their work, as I had seen them as stars.

  When Sirone found out that I had this pot, he somehow conned me into fronting him half a pound. This wasn’t great pot and at the time was probably worth about $300.

  He never paid me back. Once, when we had been smoking a lot of pot and playing, I tried to press him about when he was going to pay me back. Said it wasn’t very revolutionary to rip off another musician.

  It was hot in his loft and he didn’t have a shirt on. He went into this diatribe about Michael Rockefeller, who had traveled into the darkest regions of Africa and disappeared. It was feared that he had been eaten by cannibals. Sirone stood there, eyes rolled into the back of his head. There was a wolf trying to escape from under his skin—his muscles rippling, sweat dripping off his body—and he goes off into this story about the Rockefeller kid but from the point of view of the African warriors who had discovered and eaten him. How he deserved it. I took this to be a threat, because it was a threat. I was a kid, and this money that I lost I let go as being a sort of tuition. />
  Once when I was over at Sirone’s, the contentious Stanley Crouch stopped by. Stanley Crouch made it clear that he didn’t like Sirone playing with a white kid. Would not respond to me directly. Wouldn’t look at me. I sat on the couch while he and Sirone animatedly enjoyed each other’s company. Stanley told a story about Louis Armstrong knocking out Jack Teagarden, a white trombone player, which was clearly meant to put me in my place.

  But I grew to really like Stanley. I would always run into him in the East Village and we would argue. He had such a sharp mind, fast and funny, and he was really confident with his mind and his arguments. Though when it came to race, he was really a bitch.

  He used to run the Tin Palace, a small jazz club on the corner of Bond and Bowery. I ran into him on the street at a time where The Lounge Lizards were really getting a ton of attention in the press and said he should book us. We would have easily sold out the Tin Palace for nights on end and there was often no one in there.

  I would really rather have been playing jazz clubs than CBGB’s. But Stanley said, “I saw you play, I can get twenty-five black alto players to play the tricks you play.”

  Okay, Stanley.

  But still, I liked running into him. I was in Binibon when Stanley came in and I had posters for Leukemia. This was shortly after I first met him at Sirone’s and before The Lounge Lizards.

  Stanley saw the poster and said, “Leukemia! Perfect! The white cells overrunning the red.”

  I mean, it was an asshole thing to say, but still pretty fucking good.

  I was just giving this book a once-over before handing it in to Random House and read that Stanley died today. I guess the last years of his life were really rough. Was really sorry to hear that. I don’t think we ever had one civil conversation, but I was fond of Stanley.

  * * *

  —

  Sirone and I fell out of touch. I think that he actually felt bad about the pot thing, but no way could he afford to pay me back. His money always had more pressing places to be.

  About five years later, when my band had gotten off the ground and I was getting some attention, I ran into him again. The playing field was more level now and we started hanging out as equals.

  Sirone introduced me to his drug of choice: freebasing cocaine. I’d usually take dope before I went to his place, get half the money from him—an improvement on our earlier relationship—and then go up to Gabrielle’s and get a gram or whatever we could afford, then I’d bring it back downtown and Sirone would meticulously cook it up like an alchemist.

  We’d smoke and then we’d !!!!!!!!!PLAY!!!!!!!!! for about ten minutes. Then we’d smoke some more and then !!!!!­!!!!!­!!!!PLAY!!!!!­!!!!!­!!!!!­!! We’d do this until the coke ran out.

  Smoking coke has a particular kind of insanity that is all its own. There is something about smoking coke that does this thing to you: When it runs out, you crawl around on the floor and any little white piece of fluff or bit of plaster or paint chip is thought to be a little rock of cocaine and is snatched up and smoked.

  We used to treat this shit like it was gold, so the idea that we might drop a chunk of it on the floor and forget about it was absurd. The funny thing is that after you’ve smoked a few times, you know that you are going to be scouring the floor for what we called “unidentified hits” after you’ve run out.

  I wrote on a piece of paper: “I, John Lurie and I, Norris Jones A.K.A. Sirone do solemnly swear that when the cocaine is finished we will not crawl on the floor to collect and smoke unidentified objects.” We both signed it. Of course when the coke was gone we were crawling around and smoking weird white things, but at least we were laughing about it, and Sirone had the greatest big full laugh.

  * * *

  —

  I went to see an acupuncturist in Chinatown named Dr. Gong. He’s supposed to have helped Keith Richards quit. On the wood-paneled walls are little framed pictures of Dr. Gong and celebrities. Though they are mostly of Dr. Gong and Dinah Shore. Dr. Gong and Dinah Shore buying a hot dog at Coney Island. Dr. Gong and Dinah Shore in a rowboat in Central Park, both smiling at the camera. Dr. Gong and Dinah Shore on a Ferris wheel.

  He comes in smoking a Marlboro. As he picks up the needles, the long ash from the cigarette stuck in his mouth falls into the tray of sterile needles. He blows the ash out of the silver tray and smiles at me. Dr. Gong’s technique is to insert the needles and then attach an electric charge to each one. You lie there for an hour with your muscles doing berserk twitching. The twitching is so violent, I wonder how he stops his patients from flying out the window and landing on the pavement in a pile.

  Afterward, when I got out onto the street, it was dark, around eight at night. I felt surprisingly good. Looked around the street at Chinatown and felt a little alive for a change.

  I heard the laugh behind me. That big wolf laugh. I knew immediately who it was, before I even turned around.

  Sirone was with his little Japanese girlfriend. They just looked like the perfect, innocent couple coming from dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

  Sirone leans in and whispers to me, “Let’s get into some devilment.”

  He makes some excuse to his girlfriend and we drop her in a cab. Go to cop some coke and dope and get fucked up.

  Whatever Dr. Gong had done to my nervous system made me enjoy the drugs more than I had in months.

  I wouldn’t have expected to see Sirone in Chinatown at night in a million years. But that is what always happened. I’d vow to stop and the drugs would find me.

  When I first moved to the East Village, there was a girl I saw around who I had an enormous crush on. She had long, sinewy arms and legs and walked around the neighborhood with incredible pride and strength. She looked like a panther.

  About two years later I met her in a club. Her name was Rebecca. I brought her back to my uncle Jerry’s, where I was staying. My uncle was out of town, otherwise I never would have brought Rebecca there. She was like a wild animal, the way she moved, the way she sussed out a new environment. Her eyes darting.

  Rebecca never ate. The only thing that I ever saw her eat was hot sauce or mustard.

  She was hungry and asked if she could open this enormous jar of mustard that was in my uncle’s cupboard. I said it was okay, I guessed, but we couldn’t eat any of my uncle’s food. She said that was okay, she just wanted some mustard.

  When my uncle came back to town, he came into my room pissed about something. I was always nervous that he would discover that his giant bottle of codeine was missing.

  “Look, I don’t mind you staying here and you’re welcome to anything you want. All I ask is that if you finish something of mine, replace it. Or just tell me that you’ve finished it and I’ll buy more.”

  That’s a weird reaction to me taking his codeine pills.

  “I don’t think I did finish anything.” Man, I lied to my uncle. I never lied. Even when I was a junkie I never lied to anyone.

  He held up the enormous restaurant-sized jar of mustard, which had been scraped completely dry. I was thinking, Damn, Rebecca, how could anyone eat that whole giant jar of mustard in one night?

  My uncle would come home and eat Chinese food, watching the TV in my room. He screamed at the screen during football games. I thought it embarrassing. Of course, I now do the exact same thing myself.

  * * *

  —

  I had to go to Texas to be in Wim Wenders’s movie Paris, Texas. Wim was a fan of the band and friends with Jim and had asked me to do a part in the movie. Wenders had made The American Friend, one of my and Evan’s favorite movies. It has the line “Throw a gangster off a train going eighty miles an hour, then you throw a second one: How much time passes between the two events, if the train doesn’t change speed?” So I had to do it.

  But now I couldn’t find out what was going on. I kept calling the production office, and t
hey would tell me to keep this period free, then when that time came I wouldn’t hear from them. I would call and call again, not reaching anybody and getting the runaround when I did. Finally it was set to happen. But it was one of those things where they said, “Would you mind purchasing your ticket yourself and then we will reimburse you when you get down here?”

  I didn’t want to go down there being this strung out. Gabrielle, Rebecca, and I decided to go to Jamaica for a few days before, so I could dry out.

  It was a good combination somehow. Gabrielle, who lived all in her brain and had this odd, nonathletic little body that she seemed completely unaware of, and Rebecca, the panther.

  We go out to rent motorcycles. Gabrielle has money and credit cards but the guy doesn’t want to rent to us because we must look like complete freaks. We have to lie to the rental guy and say that we all know how to ride a motorcycle. Neither Rebecca nor Gabrielle has ever been on a motorcycle before and I have only ridden the one I crashed in Mexico.

  Rebecca and I fake it and get on the bikes and are starting to ride out of the parking lot when we hear the sound of a big clank behind us.

  We turn around and Gabrielle, before she has even gotten it started, has fallen over with the bike. She’s scraped her leg. We go back, reluctantly, to see if she’s okay and the guy makes us give all the bikes back.

  We sleep in three separate beds. I can’t sleep because I’m a little dope sick. At about four in the morning Rebecca gets up. I’m hungry. So is Rebecca. She wants to go get something to eat.

  “We’re in Jamaica, you can’t get food at four in the morning. Nothing’s open.”

  “I’m going to go out, I’m sure there’s something.”

  “Bring me something.”

  When I wake up hours later, Rebecca is still gone. Gabrielle is having coffee. She has that New York accent thing.

  “You want sum cawfee?”

  “No thanks, can’t drink coffee when I’m dope sick.”