by John Lurie
Why isn’t Gabrielle dope sick? How can she be sitting there drinking her coffee all pretty and composed like that?
About seven-thirty a.m., Rebecca comes back in. She’s got a miserable looking mango and a coconut and some other unidentified piece of fruit. They look inedible.
“You want some?” She holds up this stuff like it’s treasure.
Then she says something bit her arms. She shows me. There are angry red welts all over her arms. What she’s done is gone out into the brush, climbed up trees, and picked this stuff herself.
Gabrielle is in her underwear; she has nice legs and a nice butt. Rebecca says, “You have a nice butt, Gabrielle.” Rebecca is wearing her rubber pants and is doing contortion stretching, I am practicing the alto in my underwear. When the room service guy brings Gabrielle another coffee, he looks puzzled by the goings-on in room 104.
Gabrielle says she’s going swimming. Rebecca and I wait in the room and Gabrielle is back in a second. She’s whimpering.
“What’s wrong, Gabrielle?”
“I went in the wawter.”
The salt water has burned the scrape on her leg. Rebecca and I look at each other and try desperately not to laugh. When Gabrielle goes into the bathroom, I say, in a whisper, “I went in the wawter,” and we burst into hysterics.
We say it for the rest of the trip, sobbing with laughter, “I went in the wawter.”
Ray, who drives the glass-bottomed boat, stops by the room.
“You want to see the beautiful fishes?”
I say no, but Gabrielle goes. She’s gone a long time. When she gets back, though she won’t admit it at first, she’s fucked the guy from Ray’s Shell Boat on some island. Now she’s complaining because he fucked her in the woods somewhere and her ass hurts from pieces of bark and pebbles.
Ray stops by to take us by boat to a restaurant. I love going out on the ocean at night in a boat.
We arrive at this fairly high stone wall with a metal ladder coming down.
The waves are high and the boat is rocking. Gabrielle can’t get off the boat onto the ladder. She stands at the front of the boat trying to grab on but can’t.
Rebecca goes and lies down on the front of the boat with her torso extended out, in a straight line, past the end, hovering over the waves. She grabs hold of the ladder and Gabrielle steps on her back like a gangway to get to the ladder.
* * *
—
Paris, Texas is odd. Gabrielle, without asking me, decides to buy Rebecca a ticket to come with me to Houston. I don’t really want this. Rebecca is just a little too wild. It might be hard to concentrate. Rebecca can spend forty minutes making sure that the window is cracked to exactly the right height for draft and temperature.
We are in one of those towering hotels in downtown Houston. I go down to do wardrobe and when I get back, the lights are all off in the room.
Then Rebecca, from the darkness, turns on the lamp and then turns it off. Then she does it again.
“John, you have to see this. Come here.” She has her face pressed against the big window and is peering seventeen floors below.
She turns the light on and off and then a car in the parking lot turns its lights on and off. She does it again and the car does it again. This is beginning to feel a little frightening.
Rebecca thinks that this is fantastic.
“See!”
“See what? Who is that?”
“It’s Wim Wenders!”
“What are you talking about?”
“In the car, making the signals. It’s Wim Wenders! I bet they are filming us right now.”
For a moment, I look for hidden cameras, getting sucked into the madness, and then think, No, why would they bother? Later, Rebecca will find out that it was the parking lot attendant, who was watching her all along.
Next morning at the hotel breakfast, Wim makes his appearance at my table. He seems fascinated by Rebecca, who is indeed fascinating.
“She looks just like you.”
Rebecca does look a lot like me. “Yes, that’s the attraction,” I say.
So I don’t really know what’s going on with the movie or what my part is. All I know is that I am Nastassja Kinski’s boyfriend and that I have a big fight over her with Harry Dean Stanton. I haven’t seen a script.
The next morning, early, the production moves en masse to a motel on the highway in the middle of nowhere and goes off to shoot.
Rebecca and I are just stuck there, on the highway, with no car.
I am thinking, This is nuts. I don’t know what my part is or what I’m getting paid, I paid for my airfare, and now I have just been abandoned on the highway for twelve hours.
There is no food and the TV doesn’t work. I am pissed. This is how movies treat people? This is worse than a music tour. I don’t like being stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Rebecca grabs her dirty clothes and proceeds to walk out onto the highway in search of a laundromat.
She comes back four hours later and says she found a laundromat fifteen miles away.
The next day we move to Port Arthur, Texas.
My character is a high class pimp who runs the whorehouse that Nastassja Kinski is working in.
My outfit is a powder blue tuxedo. It’s ridiculous.
“I can’t wear this.” It looks like an outfit from a prom worn by the most unpopular kid in school.
The production is completely out of money, they know this outfit is awful, but this is what they have.
I go out in Port Arthur and find a superfly pimp store, where I buy this purple suit. On the way back, I meet this strange guy who appears out of nowhere. I swear he looked exactly like Lee Harvey Oswald. I think he was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Wim says the suit is fantastic. No one reimburses me for the suit I bought but Wim sends Claire Denis, the assistant director, to buy two of the same for him. Claire uses her own money, and then Wim, according to Claire, never pays her back. Ah, the life.
Nastassja is breathtakingly beautiful. A woman whose beauty would make almost any straight man begin to stammer.
Harry Dean Stanton is a wonderfully cranky fuck with a mellifluous voice.
The three of us share a tiny little cubicle as a dressing room and are fooling around in there for a long time.
Harry and I are hanging in there. We are not stammering.
The wardrobe person comes and says Harry and I will have to leave because Nastassja has to change now. As it’s our dressing room, too, and we have nowhere else to go, and as Nastassja has just appeared nude in thirty different magazines, Harry and I say in unison, “Why??” I bet it sounded like a couple of kids who’ve had their toy taken away.
My first scene, Wim and Kit Carson are discussing what I am going to say; the original script was written by Sam Shepard but they have abandoned that and are writing daily what will happen. I stick my head around a corner to see Harry Dean and tell him, “All the girls are downstairs.”
I do it once. Something is wrong with the light. “All the girls are downstairs.” Do it again, same problem. “All the girls are downstairs.” Do it a third time and the boom is in the shot. Suddenly, I think that it’s me. These aren’t the problems, they are just saying these are the problems so as to not come right out and say, “This guy sucks, get someone else.”
The next day my call is at ten a.m. I get picked up by the teamster driver. Karen Black, whose son is playing the little boy in the film, wants a ride to the set. We get into the car and she announces that she now wants to stop at the health food store. The health food store is miles out of the way. We drive there. I am late now. She disappears into the health food store for almost an hour. Comes back and we drive to the set. It’s eleven forty-five a.m.; they are pissed at me for being late. Ah, the life.
The crew has not been paid in weeks
and they are upset. There is a rumor that Wim is taking the money for their salaries and buying film stock with it. My big fight scene with Harry and my scenes with Nastassja are not shot because they have run out of money. The whole reason I took the job was this big scene with her, and then the fight with Harry, and now they are not shooting them. I’m told I can go home, but would I mind buying my own ticket and they will reimburse me? Ah, the life.
18
I Was Instructed to Slouch Down to Eat My Sandwich
I had forgotten all about Stranger Than Paradise. I was growing a beard.
Jim had persevered. It took him a year and a half, but he was finally able to find the money to finish it. I don’t know how he did it. He had screened the first half hour and I heard it didn’t play so well. Someone who was there, I think Gary Indiana, said that it was like watching cancer dry.
I had been cast in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, as Saint James, which was scheduled to shoot in a month. I was growing a beard for the part. Jim said that I had to shave, which I wasn’t going to do, and we argued about it.
My character could have grown a beard. Then Last Temptation was postponed and I shaved.
I had sublet my apartment on Third Street. I didn’t want to go back there after getting hit on the head. I wasn’t living anywhere. I had gone to María’s, in L.A., after Paris, Texas and then when I came back to New York, I stayed sometimes at my uncle’s or with one of a number of different women, but I really didn’t have a home.
I had gotten back into heroin once again and had to kick before going to do Jim’s movie. I had nowhere to do it. I couldn’t kick heroin at my uncle’s.
I rented a room at the Century Paramount. That hotel is now the fancy Paramount Hotel on Forty-sixth Street, but then it was a crappy place for forty-five bucks a night with ugly carpets. Carpets that smelled. Carpets that had absorbed twenty-five years of vulgar activity.
I stayed mostly in my room and then would go down to the bar and drink three or four sombreros. There was never a soul in the bar. The bartender eyed me with suspicion. I’m sure I was a wreck.
I couldn’t eat. Tried a bag of pistachios, but no good. Sombreros were my diet.
We shot the last third of Stranger first, in Florida. I was still a little sick. I see those scenes where we are driving in the car, I look at my face, and I can feel exactly that illness I was in.
There was no script. Jim claims there was one, but I certainly felt like I was writing the dialogue as we went along, with Eszter helping. I certainly never saw a script if there was one. Apparently Jim put together a script after the movie was finished, but how does that count?
Jim would say that he wanted such and such to happen and I would map out the dialogue for the three of us, and then get Jim’s okay.
Jim seemed lost. Eszter started mimicking him: Every time he left the room, she went, “Um, um, I don’t know.”
There was a scene at the airport where I was supposed to be drunk. I got drunk. And then terrorized the airport. Acting drunk is a mistake. I didn’t seem drunk in the scene, I was just bad.
Rammellzee came down to shoot a scene. He was a painter who had an amazing thing with language. I think later he lost that thing he had, but at the time he was remarkable. He’d walk around wearing goggles as sunglasses or God knows what, inventing fashion moment by moment. His painting wasn’t as good as Jean-Michel’s, but he had something and he was an edgier, wilder soul than Willie. He used to call Jean-Michel “Scribble Scrabble.” I thought his great thing was language, and his voice, like Sly Stone coming out of a cartoon wolf.
I drove Rammel to the airport and he was dressed so weird that they didn’t want to let him on the plane. Rammel had a very big thing about traveling first-class. Always first-class, which was not at all in the budget. He was standing in line getting weirder and weirder and angrier and angrier because he just didn’t understand, if he was going first-class, why it was taking so fucking long. Now they didn’t want to let him on the plane at all because he was so strange and so angry. I took the guy collecting tickets aside and explained that he was a “special” person, and they let him on.
Eszter was angry and thought that I was fucked up to resort to that. Which I suppose it was, but they, for sure, weren’t going to let him on the plane if I hadn’t done that.
We finished in Florida and went to Cleveland.
It was cold in Cleveland. Brutally cold. Painful. There is a scene where we are looking at Lake Erie and we’re wearing skimpy little coats. I could hardly think, it was so cold.
There were a lot of scenes in the car, and Drew Kunin, the six-foot-two-inch wonderful soundman, lay curled up all askew on the floor, all entangled in my legs. We spent days like that. Cold and uncomfortable, Drew curled around my feet.
Drew would mimic me from the floor of the car, saying, “Awful, horrible, terrible.” I tend to not be the most positive person on a film set.
There was no money. I remember Sara Driver, who was producing the movie, bringing me a sandwich. Even back then my blood sugar was a problem, so I really needed to eat.
I was instructed to slouch down behind a car, in the freezing cold, to eat it. That way, no one else would see and want a sandwich for themselves.
The crew was miserable. There was no food. We were all sleeping on people’s sofas. It was hideously cold. But I was straight. By the time we got to Cleveland, I was gaining strength and a hundred times more affable than I had been in Florida. No one understood why I had changed so radically. At the point where they were all miserable and ready to go home, I had become completely gung-ho about the project.
The thing did seem to get a momentum of its own. Seemed to gain a flow.
We finished it and again, I forgot all about Stranger Than Paradise. It was just two weeks working on a project.
19
If The Lounge Lizards Play in the Forest and No One Is There to Hear It…
Tony came into the rehearsal laughing. As tough as he was, Tony Garnier was just the cutest. Maybe the toughness made him cuter.
“That Michael Jackson, boy. ‘The chair is not my gun.’ ” There was that little boing in his voice as he laughed.
“What are you talking about?”
We had decided to cover “Billie Jean” as a joke, and Tony had taken the record home and listened to it.
“Those are the words, ‘The chair is not my son.’ ” We didn’t believe him until we all sat down and listened to it together. It is true, the words are “The chair is not my son,” or maybe even “gun.”
We played at Danceteria in New York. The gig was awful. The crowd was creepy. We had played there many times before, but it hadn’t been creepy like this.
After the show, we were in the dressing room and I was pretty depressed. My friend Liz sat on a table up against the wall, not saying anything, but watching me the whole time.
I was being drained. People we didn’t know were filing into the dressing room. Rockets Redglare came rushing in, right after I had been paid for the gig. I’m walking around paying the guys with cash in my hand, and there’s Rockets. He had an uncanny knack for knowing the exact moment there would be cash, and appeared, whining, “John, I need twenty dollars.” Relentless: “I need twenty dollars, John.” Following me around while I’m paying the band. Back then, in 1983, Rockets weighed three hundred fifty pounds. The high-pitched whine coming from this huge vessel was not making any sense. He would not stop, you knew he would not stop, he was somehow entitled. You really could not end up not giving him $20.
Later, right before he died, I heard Rockets weighed seven hundred pounds. For a while he had no teeth, having lost them in a fight, but later he had a big giant set of white, gnashing things in his mouth after the dentist had fixed him up. Rockets was a stand-up comedian and a very convincing actor. He’s in a million movies. I was watching Talk Radio
with Eric Bogosian on my VCR and heard Rockets’s voice as one of the people who call in to Bogosian’s radio show. I paused the VCR to call Rockets.
“Hey, I just heard your voice on Talk Radio.”
“Yeah! I kill him at the end!” He said it very proudly as he ruined the movie for me.
Rockets was on 120 milligrams of methadone a day, and drank a bottle of Stoli and freebased a lot every night. If I hung around Rockets for one evening, it would take three days to recover.
When we would get high at his place, he would start talking about the Fire Escape Monster, late at night. Not that he was seeing the Fire Escape Monster at that moment, but you could tell there had been some real battles in the past.
I didn’t mind Rockets mooching after the gigs so much. That was just part of the life. I loved Rockets. Though he was devoid of morals, certainly when it came to drugs and money, and though his stand-up comedy routine was horrendous, Rockets had something to offer. Rockets was the real thing. In my world, Rockets was a legitimate citizen.
What bothered me was all those people, pushing their way into the dressing room, who were just psychically selfish. They gave nothing, had no compassion, and just took. And what they took could not be quantified, but it was way more than money or drugs.
That night the crowd seemed to be only a sea of unconscious, leering cretins. We couldn’t rise above it and I was lost. Trying to make the music beautiful was dangerous. When it failed, it just sat there vulnerable and flat. The only thing good, oddly enough, was “Billie Jean,” because it was a joke, and we nailed it. Only a joke could have stayed afloat above that atmosphere.
Liz sat perched in the corner watching me as one asshole after another came into the crappy dressing room and took a little chunk of my soul. They’d ask for drugs or drink tickets. The inevitable guy who comes in right after the show and tells you that he used to play the drums, then stands there like this is the opening to an enlightened conversation. Now, as a fellow musician, you have a certain connection and you must respect him because he used to play the drums.
