by John Lurie
Liz and I aren’t getting along. I don’t want to get high and she is committed. She is go-go dancing and disappearing all the time. She says she’s going to the store and is gone for four hours. Her explanations are vague and distant. Not only is she disappearing, but my wad of hundred dollar bills, from the movie score, is dwindling. I cannot figure out how we are spending it this fast. It seems so obvious now—you read this and you know what happened—but I just refused to allow it into my head.
We’re on Third Street, sleeping on the foam pad on the floor, and an insane racket from the men’s shelter wakes us. Bloodcurdling cries and leering laughter. This is what Hell sounds like.
Liz doesn’t open her eyes. She turns her head to the wall and says, “This isn’t what life is supposed to be.”
She’s right. It’s no way to live.
I am really trying not to get high. I slip up but I am not on a mission with it. Liz, for sure, is getting high and keeping it from me. She is supposed to be home at eleven p.m. and doesn’t show until four a.m. I am dying to have some of that amazing sex we would have. Sirone has started calling me “Johnny Cakes” and then just “Cakes,” which is kind of an insult. But I like the sound of it. I’m waiting on Liz and I do a painting of a guy waiting by a door. I write under it, “Pain for Cakes.” Then when she comes home I change it to “No Pain for Cakes.” When we used that for the title of our fourth album, some clever journalist thought that it was a reference to Marie Antoinette. But it was really a love message to Liz.
I had that turquoise blue couch, the one that Klaus Nomi had spotted on the street and helped me carry home. (I know I mention this before, but the image of me and Klaus Nomi carrying this turquoise couch through the East Village war zone is something one should form an image of in one’s mind.) I walked into my apartment with Frank the manager and Liz was just sitting there on the blue couch staring at the wall. I didn’t think much about it, but Frank was flipping out about it later.
“John, this is not normal, I’ve never seen anything so depressing. I think this Lenny Bruce and Honey shit is just boring. She was just staring at the wall!”
This was not unusual. I realized that often I would come in and she’d just be staring at the wall.
But Liz, shit, you had to love Liz. She was fun and funny and smart and sexy as hell. Liz really was everything you could hope for in a woman. It’s just that she was a junkie.
I’d be driving and she would unzip my fly and take it out and yell, “John’s penis!” like she had just found the prize in the Cracker Jack box.
She had that thing that I would fall for again later, that thing where her pain, her wound, was just so poignant. When she had come out to L.A. and it was clear that María and I were finished, the thing that pissed María off the most was that I was taking care of this girl who was just hopeless. María had never asked for a thing, outside of trying to get me to get a driver’s license. Now I’ve got a bit of money from the film score and I’m flying this girl to L.A. to help her kick dope. María was hurt and enraged. She was right, too, she got a raw deal, but the heart just goes like that.
Stranger Than Paradise and Paris, Texas are at the Telluride Film Festival. Finally, I am invited. The last part of the trip is in this bumpy little plane and I do not like it.
There is a softball game between Paris, Texas and Stranger Than Paradise. Really more between the Samuel Goldwyn Company and whoever released Paris, Texas, with me and Jim on the Stranger team and a bunch of businesspeople I didn’t know on the other team.
I’m a good ballplayer. Even though I am in a fog, I insist that I am sure that I am the best guy to play center field. In the first inning someone hits a fly ball to left center. It’s a bit of a run but I lope under it, casually stick out my glove. I see the ball sail six inches beyond my reach. I have to run to the fence and retrieve it. This is bad. It’s on my list of the top fifty moments I would like to have a do-over for.
Wim Wenders arrives late. He has been on vacation and he looks incredibly handsome. He is wearing shorts and his legs look like a star soccer player’s. He doesn’t know a thing about baseball and is positioned in short right field, twenty feet behind second base, so as to stay out of harm’s way. Someone hits a rifle shot and Wim leaps and makes an astounding, diving catch that Brooks Robinson would have been proud of.
There are not really any women at this festival. I thought there would be. I have a room in this ski lodge that I have to share with the publicist. They spring this on me at the last minute and I am a little pissed. The publicist, Reid Roosevelt, is a nice enough guy, it’s just this isn’t star treatment. It is assistant director treatment, but that is what I always seemed to get when Jim was in charge.
I am sitting next to Wim at the screening of Paris, Texas. The lights go down and he whispers to me, “We had to cut the harmonica scene.”
There was a thing in the film where I played harmonica over the phone to Nastassja Kinski, right after Harry Dean Stanton left the booth. When the film played at Cannes it was still in there, and it has come back to me a few times that the scene is great. That it got applause. I’m disappointed that he cut it.
We take ski lifts to the top of a hill to do a press conference. There is no snow because it’s August and I don’t like being up in this thing with the hard ground twenty feet below my dangling feet.
I am starting to seem like a big deal. Stan Brakhage introduces himself to me. Then Athol Fugard starts saying something to me. I don’t understand what this little man is talking about and make a wisecrack. Someone says, “John, that is Athol Fugard, you should be more respectful.”
So there is a big press conference. I think it is all kinds of funny, the conceptual questions that they are asking Jim and that he is addressing with a straight face.
Werner Herzog stands up. He is wearing lederhosen. He starts ranting, “John Lurie is the most natural actor I have ever seen! When Hollywood sees John Lurie they will be terrified! They will be shamed by their phony actors. Paul Newman and Robert Redford will run for the hills!”
After the press conference, all the business and press people take the ski lift down, and every creative person—Wim, Werner, Athol Fugard, Jim, me, and whoever else—decides to walk. I don’t know if it’s all for the same reason—fear—but I suspect so.
I get the feeling that Stranger is taking on a life of its own. That whatever the movie was, it no longer is.
The press have anointed it and that is that.
23
All the Girls Want to See My Penis
This should have been a great time for me. But somehow it wasn’t. To be thrown into that kind of fame is very unbalancing. It is worse for your chemistry than drugs, in a way. You want the attention and the adoration, it gives you a buoyancy, but it rarely leads to anything real. Fame comes at you in hideous ways, from all directions, and there is no way to protect yourself, especially if you don’t have a penny.
But you get high from it and you absolutely want it to continue. “Someone at the airport didn’t recognize me. I have to fix that.”
And now my poverty is hard to wear. It is not cool to be famous and not have the means to insulate yourself. I am walking down the street, a bit hungover, in a shirt I didn’t have time to clean, and everyone knows me. They look. And there I am on the cover of a magazine staring out from the rack outside the store. Who am I? Am I that person, all tough and confident in clean clothes, or am I this wretch trying to get down Second Avenue?
That summer, before Stranger Than Paradise came out, I was with Liz. I was really with Liz and I didn’t think about other girls. That thing where you walk down the street and you just don’t even look at attractive women because your mechanism just isn’t set off by it. I’ve got what I want, no need to look. You can be sitting at an outside restaurant and a beautiful ass floats by inches from your face, so close you can smell it, and you do
n’t even turn your head. This, of course, in months, sometimes years, eventually wears off. Liz and I also had an understanding that if I was on the road with the band, of course I would be with other women, and the same went for her while I was gone.
But now all the girls want to see my penis. Maybe it has something to do with seeing somebody on screen at ten times their normal size. No, it’s not that, it’s something else. I don’t know what it is. I wonder which creepy celebrities have women throwing themselves at them. Maybe all of them. What an awful thought.
The first time I got that look, that glance, was outside a theater in Paris. The band was on tour in Europe that summer after Cannes. Variety was playing at a theater and Bette Gordon asked me to come and say a few words after the film at some kind of cultural place.
I take a cab and get out but can’t figure out where the theater is. There is this pretty young woman outside wearing a button that says she is working for the place. I say excuse me. I see that flash of recognition across her face and then she opens. Just opens herself.
Not like she is attracted to me but some other thing. I ask for directions and she gives me that pheromone thing, where she is saying, You can have me if you want to. I understand if you don’t, but if you want me, I am available to you. Take me.
She was beautiful, and more than that, she had that thing in her face where you just knew that she was not only intelligent but kind and seemed to have a grasp on the weirdness and toughness of life, no matter how young she was. I should have just married her immediately and skipped past the rest of the beautiful, sexy, hideous insanity that was to come.
I go into the side of the theater and the people who are running the thing make it very clear that the packed house is here not to see the movie, but because it has been announced that I will be there. But I don’t really have much to say. I am going to just answer questions. I am really just going as a favor to Bette Gordon.
It is unbelievable. I start to talk and all the women in the crowd start swooning. Three days ago in New York, I was this same exact person. Looked and walked and talked exactly the same. Nobody was swooning.
They run out of questions and there is a funny pause. I am standing there and haven’t done this sort of thing before. I feel a little silly. A couple of the guys in the band, who played on the score, are out in the audience. Dougie raises his hand. I see that it’s Dougie and call on him like I am a schoolteacher.
“Yes, Dougie?”
“May I go to the bathroom?”
“Yes, Dougie.”
He gets up and runs out of the room.
That fall Stranger is a big deal at the New York Film Festival. Eszter and I are perplexed as to how Jim “Um, um, I don’t know” Jarmusch has been proclaimed an auteur and a coming force in film.
We are up in the balcony at Lincoln Center. The fancy seats. I’m sitting next to Liz, with Jim, Sara Driver, the producers, and people from the festival. These are the fancy people in the fancy seats.
Liz seems bored and uncomfortable in the midst of all this ritzy, phony culture stuff.
She whispers into my ear, “You want a blow job?”
I am the star of a movie opening the New York Film Festival, at Lincoln Center, but at that moment, the blow job sounds much more compelling and real. So we sneak out from the VIP seats in the balcony. Liz goes into the ladies’ room to make sure the coast is clear and we spend most of the rest of the movie having sex in a toilet stall.
I got asked to do something at this little club in the Village. Too small for the band, but the guy thought that I could play solo there.
I didn’t realize how small the place was when I said yes. There is only room for about forty people. Because the place is tiny, the guy doesn’t advertise and there is hardly anyone there at all. I wrote three pieces, and for the third, I had Liz and Rebecca dancing in G-strings. Just for the hell of it. I didn’t think much about it, just doing it to do something, and of course, for the money, because I didn’t have any.
When I go to play, there are only about twenty people in the crowd. It feels very odd and naked. But it seems like everyone who is there is somebody. I can’t remember now exactly who. I know Francesco and Alba Clemente were there, John Sayles and his producer, and a couple other people of note. So it’s a small room already and it feels uncomfortably empty and intimate. I can usually pull this kind of thing off, but tonight the sound is shitty and I can’t.
I haven’t really prepared much and the people who are there are almost all heavyweights in one form or another. I don’t even know how they could have found out about it, but it’s embarrassing to have them witness this tawdry fiasco. Liz and Rebecca both have glitter all over themselves, which eventually gets all over me. Glitter is hard to get off, so I’m covered in glitter when I go onstage.
The Village Voice did an article on me and I shared the cover of the paper with Whoopi Goldberg. When the band first started, we used to go and wait to get the Voice the night before it came out at Astor Place. We wanted to see if we had been picked for “Voice Choice,” a listing of which bands were best to see that week. It was exciting.
Once, when I called Robert Christgau, the editor of the section, I got his wife on the phone. Christgau gave us a Voice Choice pretty much every time we played. But I had to inform him that we were playing, and now I had his wife on the phone. I had to tell her to tell him before noon or it would miss the deadline. I’d just woken up and the words were coming out garbled and sideways.
Try saying “Lounge Lizards” right after you wake up. She couldn’t understand me.
“Can you please tell Robert that The Lounge Lizards are playing this week, on Friday?”
“Excuse me, who?”
“The Lounge Lizards.”
“The Lungers?”
“No, The Lounge Lizards.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“The Lounge Lizards.”
“The Lozenges?”
“Yes, that’s right, The Lozenges.”
* * *
—
I went to the newsstand to buy The Village Voice with the feature about me. I kind of skulked in and tucked it under my arm like I was buying porn. I felt so uncomfortable with the whole situation.
I took the paper and went onto the basketball court across from the police station on Fifth Street, where I used to make Jean-Michel play. It was cold, leaves were blowing out on the court, nobody was out. I sat back against the mesh fence to read the article. I didn’t want anyone to see me reading it.
The guy who wrote it had hung out with me for a couple of days. I hadn’t really done an article like this before. I hadn’t hidden anything from the guy. I was naïve enough to think that he would have the good taste not to put in personal stuff that had nothing to do with my work. Or if he did put in this personal stuff, that he would get it right. It wasn’t as bad as what The New Yorker did to my life years later, but it was bad. And sloppy and worthless. There seems to often be something deeply wrong with these people who pretend to be journalists but are really professional gossipers. Their articles tend to have more to do with the psychological deformities of the writer than anything else.
The article was a lot more personal than I had expected. There was stuff in there about Liz that just had no business being in there, and there was a line that said: “Liz, his girlfriend, there are always lots of girlfriends…,” or something to that effect. That must have made Liz feel awful.
I felt invaded. Defiled.
One thing that really struck me as awful and just wrong was how he treated my mom’s death in conjunction with Werner Herzog going crazy over my acting at a Telluride press conference. When he asked me about how I felt about Werner’s exorbitant declaration, I explained that Werner had made one of my mom’s favorite movies, and so his outburst had really warmed me. I said, “I wish I c
ould call her and tell her.” But he has me quoted in the article as just saying, “Oh, well.” Like “Okay, my mom is dead, means nothing, let’s move on!”
If I am going to share with you something about my mom, who has just died, man, put a little something about it in the article, you little parasite.
He wrote all this stuff about my personal life and got it all wrong.
* * *
—
Frank the Manager calls.
“They want you on Letterman.”
“Really? I guess, okay.”
I had seen Letterman be snide to a couple of musicians before, so I didn’t really want to do it.
“You have to go and tell three funny stories.”
“Okay, I can tell three funny stories.”
“No, you have to go and tell three funny stories to the producer first and then they will decide to have you on or not.”
“I have to audition? Forget it, Frank, I’m not going to audition to be on a talk show.”
“This will be good for your career. You have to do it. That’s how it’s done.”
“I don’t have a career and it’s not how I’m going to ‘done.’ What’s with the Bottom Line gig?”
Frank had been hired to handle The Lounge Lizards; he was supposed to get the band a record deal. The acting fame thing just sort of fell in his lap.
“I haven’t called them yet.”
“That’s great, Frank. I’m not gonna go. Letterman is a snerb.”
“What’s a snerb?”
“I don’t know, I think I just made it up, but I’m not going.”
Frank books the audition anyway, thinking he can convince me when the time comes.
But I am with Rammellzee, Toxic, A1, a bunch of other graffiti painters, and Liz in Paul’s loft on Broadway near Waverly Place. We are getting high and painting in a mad flurry. I’ve disappeared into a wonderful, exotic world for a couple of days. When I get it together to call my answering machine, there are frantic messages from Frank and a message from David Letterman’s office asking if I plan to make it to my ten-thirty a.m. appointment, as it was now eleven a.m.
