The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  I pick her up at the airport somewhere in the south of France. I am so happy to see her coming through the gate, and what is really sweet is that while I’m hugging her, I can see the band watching us; they know what I went through those days when it seemed Liz had been swallowed by an evil shadow, and they all just are kind of beaming back, especially Roy. Like they’re happy for my happiness.

  This is very rare in life, when people are genuinely happy for you when something good finally happens.

  25

  Cheese or Hats Are Preferable

  Once I saw Bob Marley on TV, doing nothing but dancing behind some other people singing. It was so open and disarming. He was honestly dancing like no one was watching. It looked a bit ludicrous and spasmodic, which made it even more appealing. I thought the same thing as I did when I listened to Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time: “God is coming through that man.” And oddly enough, Andy Warhol made the same impression on me.

  I had expected not to like Andy, that he would be phony and a user of people’s energy, like a little mean-spirited vampire, but that wasn’t the case at all.

  Andy exuded something that was truly beautiful and almost religious in a way. He could be subtly snide, but in general there was something genuinely spiritual about the man.

  He and I and Jean-Michel went to the premiere of the Brian De Palma movie Body Double. I watched Jack Nicholson get out of the limousine in front of us and throw his arms out wide and his head back with a taunting smile, to greet the sea of loud, clamoring paparazzi. He made them love him. It was almost as if he was emanating more than they could possibly parasite off of him.

  I was impressed. I could never do that. I could absolutely never do that, at least back then. I was shy. I hated fame.

  Now, this was a terrible movie, the audience there that night knew it was a terrible movie, and I was quite positive that Andy knew it was a terrible movie. After the movie was over, people were filing out, clearly discontent with what they had seen. Andy turned to me, gently took my arm, and asked in the sweetest way, “Was that any good?”

  I loved him. He was in tune with something so pure that I was actually a little nervous to be around him, and not because he was Andy Warhol, but because his perceptions, in their completely unassuming way, were so succinct.

  Willie Mays was always with Andy around this time. There was clearly a lot of love between them, though Andy’s reasons for being attracted to Willie and Willie’s reasons for his attraction to Andy were wildly different and incompatible, and that made it feel a little off. But still, there was something quite beautiful about it. Stealing the Everlast boxing shorts photo idea bothered me for a long time, but I have officially let it go at this point. Or maybe I haven’t quite.

  One night, we were somewhere and I had to call my manager, Frank, to pick us up because there was a taxi strike. It felt like we were twelve and had wandered way off and someone had to call their dad to drive us home.

  So Frank picks us up. He is really nervous to have Andy Warhol in his car. We are coming downtown on Seventh Avenue, which has been divided into a two way street because part of Sixth is closed off.

  There are traffic cones dividing the street. We are stopped at a light when a guy in a fancy, low sports car comes bombing through from the other direction.

  The car looks more like it should be on a racetrack than the streets of Manhattan. The guy, at high speed, is weaving in and out of the cones, like he is slaloming. Knocking each one over with a gentle, expert nudge. The naughtiness and the immense driving skill are something to see.

  Jean-Michel is yelling with delight, “He’s bad, man! He’s really bad! Oh, he is bad, man!” And Andy is sitting there, quite calmly, going, “Oh my…,” like your grandmother at the end of a fireworks display.

  * * *

  —

  Liz and I move out to Brooklyn, Fort Greene, way before it becomes gentrified. There is a basement where I am supposed to work on music, and Liz has a spare room for herself. I will barely ever practice or write music in the musty basement, and Liz’s room will serve to harbor a four-foot-high pile of clothing with a couple of childhood stuffed animals sticking their legs out and not much else.

  On the day we move in, Roy and some people drive us out there with what little furniture I have. After we unload the stuff, I don’t want them to leave. I am terrified to let them leave. What are we going to do out here in Brooklyn? We’ll only have each other to talk to, and sometimes Liz just stops talking and stares at the wall for hours. I can’t just walk outside and run into people I know.

  This is in 1984, in Fort Greene. There are no restaurants. We will starve.

  The next morning I go out of the house and it’s kind of nice. Trees line the street. At one end of the block is a bunch of wild, young criminals, but the other way there is a nice park and it feels okay. I haven’t been out of the house in the daytime in months. It seems kind of optimistic.

  I find an old desk with the upper-right drawer nailed closed. Handwritten in pen, on the drawer, it says, “Remember What’s In There.”

  I get the desk home and manage to carefully pry the drawer open. “Remember What’s In There” refers to three photographs that, from the color, look to be about twenty years old. The photos are of a white GI and two Vietnamese kids. They were taken at a picnic table in an area surrounded by concrete. I can only assume that these are his kids, and that he was forced to abandon them when he was shipped home. It just breaks my heart.

  I also find a big piece of wood, which I bring home for no reason. It’s the wood I’ll later use for the Uncle Wiggly as the Devil painting that ends up being the cover for the No Pain for Cakes album.

  * * *

  —

  Eric Goode and his brother had a big dinner at Mr. Chow. They had done something at their club, Area, with every artist you could think of: Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, David Hockney, Keith Haring, Francesco Clemente, Robert Mapplethorpe, and on and on—even LeRoy Neiman, with his pet mustache, was there. They were about to do a group photo of the event, and Jean-Michel, who had arrived wearing a bird’s nest on his head, started demanding, yelling actually, “John Lurie can’t be in the photo! He’s not an artist! John Lurie can’t be in the photo!”

  I just stared at him and laughed. Jean-Michel was the only person in the room who knew I was a painter. We’d painted together for hundreds and hundreds of hours.

  So fine, I don’t care if I’m in the photo or not. But then, just at the last second, I decide, Fuck it, and go running in just as they are about to snap the picture. If you see this photo, that explains why William Wegman, who is standing next to me, is laughing so hard.

  * * *

  —

  It doesn’t work. Liz and I are not good. She’s getting high and I’m fed up. We said we’d stop and she just keeps hiding it from me.

  We’re out in Brooklyn and there are no restaurants anywhere nearby. There is a tiny little place that has takeout food by a Jamaican lady, but it’s hardly ever open. The deal was that if we moved out there, which I didn’t really want to do, then Liz would cook. At least breakfast, which she does on occasion, but with such seething irritation that it doesn’t seem safe to eat.

  I suggest that she open a restaurant in the neighborhood. Oatmeal could be her specialty. In fact, she could serve only oatmeal. When people come in to order, she could take her big spoon and slop it into their bowl. She could spit, “Here!” at them like she does at me, while the customers cower in fear.

  Liz laughs so cutely when I say that. It’s strange, that thing where you are with someone and it’s over. It’s cold and over. And you want it to be over, but then she does this little something, a laugh, a quizzical turn of the head. Something, just some little thing, and your heart melts to her again.

  Liz goes to her parents’ place in New Hampshire to dry out. Women are everywhere
, constantly coming at me, but I don’t want them.

  Liz comes back and she’s getting high immediately. Things aren’t good.

  I stay out all night to give her a dose of her own medicine, and when I come home at like eight in the morning, she is in the kitchen with this creepy coke dealer guy that we both know. They both look at me, don’t say anything. Something unseemly has happened. It’s in the air. This is not a threat to me, this guy is a joke. I would have thought that if Liz was going to cheat on me she would have picked someone classier.

  I just say, “Unbelievable,” and they both leave without a word as they study the floor in front of them.

  I also fire Frank. No Liz and no Frank. They hated each other. Always in some kind of competition, they each wanted the other one gone. The two people I talked to every day are now, suddenly, out of my life. My support system is gone. I get really depressed and just sit in the one chair in that apartment for a couple of days. I don’t eat, don’t leave the house. Don’t move.

  Then I watch Villanova, shockingly, upset Georgetown in the NCAA finals on my little black and white TV balanced on a chair, and it makes me come back to life. I hop in the shower, get dressed, and go out to a nightclub.

  I give Liz the apartment on Third Street for the time being. I still see her once in a while. I said to her once, “If we break up, all I ask is that you don’t sleep with Jean-Michel.”

  Of course, that is immediately what she does, and then she sleeps with Danny Rosen for good measure.

  For a thousand dollars I bought this enormous gold Cadillac. It was the biggest car ever made. It was bigger than a van. Kind of had to steer it like a boat. I once drove all eight guys in the band comfortably to the airport.

  I wanted to glue giant bull horns to the front of the car, but it died before I got around to it.

  Since there was no food near my house, I had to come into Manhattan for every meal, because I didn’t cook. I was lonely and never wanted to go home. I started sleeping with lots of women. A lot of them were beautiful, classy women, but just as many were women I would scarf up at a bar at three forty-five a.m. before it closed.

  I went out with this wacko woman to Jackson Heights in Queens after the bar closed. She was the only woman left in the place, so she would have to do. Her name was Mona. She was talking and talking and then suddenly, out of nowhere, she would get really mean.

  It turned out that Dougie had slept with her too. Dougie said, “Mona! She’s crazy! When I fucked her, after I came, she yelled at me, ‘Now get up and wash your hands!’ ”

  If there was no girl, I’d drive back over the Manhattan Bridge with the sun coming up, so drunk that I would have to brace myself in order to drive. There is a part of the bridge where the road changes to grating, and there would be a sudden shift in the sound under the tires. Every night I forgot about it, and every night it scared me.

  In the morning, while all the other cars were parked neatly, parallel to the curb, my big gold Cadillac would be parked almost perpendicular, blocking half the street.

  * * *

  —

  I was at some gigantic fancy party at a club. Vince Gallo comes over and grabs me by the arm. He keeps saying, “You have to meet Val. You have to meet Val.”

  I let Vince Gallo drag me for a few feet and am in front of Val Kilmer.

  Vince yells, “John, this is Val Kilmer!”

  Val Kilmer has not been in anything that I have seen. I have no idea who he is. But he looks at me as though I smell very badly. Sneers. And then walks away.

  I say, “Thanks, Vince,” and turn to go, when I bump into a woman holding a little placard. Apparently, the theme of this party is mystics. And this woman is a fortune teller.

  Now she grabs me by the arm. I’m thinking, I don’t like this fame thing, people keep grabbing me by the arm.

  She says that I must go to St. Lucia. That I will have a spiritual experience that will change my life.

  So a few months later, I book a trip to St. Lucia. I had discovered that disappearing to places like this really restores me, especially if I went alone and before the Internet made it impossible to get completely away from everything.

  I’m on this deserted beach and swim out with my snorkel gear. I see a barracuda and follow it. It isn’t big, two and a half feet or so. I’m sort of messing with it, diving down behind it. I look up and see a guy with dreadlocks sitting near my stuff on the abandoned beach, so I start to swim back.

  To my surprise, the barracuda turns and is now following me. “You fucked with me, I will now fuck with you.”

  I get to the shore and say hello to the guy sitting near my stuff. He has a nice enough face. I have learned over time how to quickly read someone and am rarely wrong.

  He tells me about a party in the neighboring town and says he will pick me up around nine. I say okay.

  He picks me up on a motorcycle and I get on the back. He races through the narrow, dusty streets, darting in and out of traffic.

  We get to the village and the party is the whole town. People are out and dancing everywhere. He buys me a beer and asks if I want to get some cocaine.

  I say okay and he asks for $5, which I give him. He is back in a moment with this little ball of something between crack and coke. I taste it with my finger. It doesn’t seem too strong or too cut with anything horrendous, so when he breaks it up and rolls it in a cigarette, I smoke it with him.

  He sees some friends. We buy more coke. This is all pretty fun, really. We go back into an alley and smoke the cocaine cigarettes. It goes on for a while.

  Around midnight the party starts to die down and he says we should go to another town. I get on the back of his bike and we go there.

  It is basically the same thing. He and I and a few other guys are drinking beer and buying these little balls of cocaine.

  This other guy, who doesn’t seem to be part of their group, sits down next to me and asks, would I like to meet a woman.

  I say, “I always want to meet a woman.” And don’t think much about it.

  Around four in the morning I am getting ready to figure out how to get back to my place when this guy appears on a motorcycle with a woman on the back.

  He tells me I can have sex with her for $30.

  I say that there must have been a misunderstanding, I don’t want to pay anyone to have sex.

  He starts to insist that I have sex with her.

  I tell him that this is nuts. And I am going home.

  He says that I have to pay anyway because he has gone back to his village to get her.

  It is starting to get heated. I walk away. He pulls out this gigantic knife, basically a small machete, and starts coming at me.

  I run to the other side of a parked car. Now there is no one out. Just me and this guy brandishing the giant knife. He is on the other side of the car. Whichever way he goes, I go the other.

  This is pretty frightening. Except this game of circling the car goes on for maybe ten minutes. It is beginning to seem ridiculous. I can avoid him all night if that is what he wants.

  So I start to laugh.

  His face swarms with something I can only call sadness. His head falls down in sorrow. If I am no longer scared, he has lost all the power in this situation. He walks away almost sulking.

  * * *

  —

  Go to see Liz on Third Street. She is sinking. The phone keeps ringing and it is Mel Bernstein. Off of the answering machine speaker I hear message after message in Mel’s angry, exasperated voice asking how she could have done this to him. Mel is a journalist and writer we used to get high with. He lives right down the block on the corner of Third Street. In one of Jean-Michel’s paintings there is a map of Third Street with Mel’s and my apartments. My place is listed as “Willie” or “Big Willie.”

  Mel is calling and calling, screami
ng for Liz to pick up. He is not someone you would think of as a tough guy, but on the answering machine he sounds ferocious and right. Liz is lying on the bed sucking her thumb and turns her face to the wall.

  “What did you do to Mel?”

  “Ah, nothing, he’s a jerk,” she says, not removing her thumb from her mouth.

  A couple of hours later there is a knock at the door. It’s Mel, and he seems like he’s about to explode. He is standing over Liz, yelling. Liz is lying on the mattress and just looks off toward the wall, like Mel is an annoying bug. Mel gets so pissed that he starts to go at her. I grab his arms from behind—I’m stronger than him—and start to negotiate him out of the apartment. Whatever has happened, I am sure Mel is in the right, but I can’t let him attack Liz like this. Right before I get him out the door, he grabs a beer bottle off the table and smashes it against the sink, so that it breaks perfectly into a weapon. I’m impressed, like, Mel, I didn’t know you had it in you.

  Mel holds the bottle up to my face.

  “What are you going to do, Mel, cut me in my own apartment?”

  Then Mel just looks really sad and leaves.

  That is twice in two months that someone has come close to stabbing me and then walked away looking crestfallen.

  * * *

  —

  I was still very poor. The money from the film score was gone in no time. I was invited to Francesco Clemente’s house for dinner. Jean-Michel was there; Julian Schnabel; Bryan Ferry, who had been very sweet to me when I had dinner with him on the first Lounge Lizards tour; the art dealer Bruno Bischofberger; and Andy Warhol. When I walked in, Andy said, “Oh, it’s the movie star!” I wasn’t sure how to take it, thought it might have been Andy’s version of an insult. He seemed to have a rule about never saying anything bad about anyone.