The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  There was something in the level of congratulatory mutual admiration that rubbed me wrong. They were having dinner at this ostentatious table that Julian had made for Francesco. The table had sharp wire mesh hanging down underneath. Julian said it wasn’t finished yet. Francesco and Alba had small kids. Were the kids to go running underneath this new kitchen table, they would surely have been decapitated. No one seemed to mind.

  It was just too much. My poverty was making me bitter, so I got drunk and went sour on the lot of them. What on earth made every napkin they drooled on valuable?

  I said too loudly, “How does it work? You drool on a napkin. Bruno decides that it is valuable. You sell it and then go out and buy this thousand dollar bottle of wine? I can appreciate that you guys are enjoying the fact that your work sells for a fortune, and for the most part I believe your work is good, but you must have some idea how many great artists there are taking quarters in tollbooths or living on the outskirts of Coney Island, who are as talented as you.”

  There was a hush. I had not actually offended anyone. They were unoffendable.

  I had only shown myself to be uncouth. I was out of the club.

  * * *

  —

  I was upstairs at Squat Theatre when the phone rang. Peter Halasz seemed very annoyed with whoever he was talking to.

  I asked, “Who was that?”

  He said, “They keep calling me to speak on new technology in the theater in Barcelona and I am not interested.”

  I said, “I would love to go to Barcelona.”

  Peter kind of tilted his head and smiled at me, almost a leer. He didn’t even say it, I just knew what he was thinking: that I knew absolutely nothing about new technology in the theater and now he was daring me to go. So I went.

  The only requirement was that I talk for forty-five minutes. I thought, I can do that.

  I imagined a small group of depressed men with beards sitting in a circle in a musty room on the third floor, leather patches on the elbows of their worn tweed jackets.

  They won’t speak much English. They’ll think that they haven’t really understood. I’ll ramble on for a while, see Barcelona, and collect my $500. Everything will be fine.

  A sexy young lady meets me at the airport. She is to be my escort, as I am a distinguished visitor.

  She spends a couple of days taking me to the Gaudí buildings, which really floor me.

  She shows me an entranceway to a building with odd shapes of metal surrounding glass.

  She tells me that Gaudí had had this very special, expensive glass brought from Paris. When it arrived he had them push it over so it would smash on the street. Then he took the broken pieces and built the metal frame around it.

  That an artist, a real artist, could be supported by the financial and political powers of the time just blew my mind. Those powers usually are intent on stopping and disappearing the artist.

  This conference is actually for some enormous and very stiff congress of international theater. There are thousands of people attending from all over the world and they take themselves very seriously. I get a little worried.

  I try talking in my room for forty-five minutes. I find talking for forty-five minutes about nonsense very difficult.

  On the day of my talk, I am brought to an enormous, elegant theater.

  “This is where I am speaking?”

  As I’m ushered down the aisle by my young, sexy friend, I begin to get really nervous. I see that there are at least seven hundred people there waiting for my lecture in the packed hall. Many of them had tweed jackets and beards, as I had expected, but these seven hundred men and women are from all over the world, and they do not look depressed at all. Their tweed jackets are not worn and they all carry an expression of sternness that is on the edge of angry.

  And they are all wearing headphones! Which means that everything I say is going to be translated and actually understood.

  I am in trouble.

  I brought a little clock to make sure I go on for forty-five minutes. I place it on the podium.

  “In theater,” I begin, “and this happens often”—I paused and looked out at the sea of serious faces—“you will have several tangents that approach the stage and move slowly, even as far as the curtain. You can take these lines to mean one of countless things, but as they are spread out, and slowly you can do that so that even a child who is counting his fingers can read just how many times.

  “Or you can fix it with glue. Or a piece of string. I like string myself. I’ve got no problem with that, but now, cowboys are all out singing in the desert, and they sing with these falsetto voices that are annoying the neighboring villages that meet solely on the same part we were talking about, before making it almost impossible to gauge where the sound is coming from. And you can have six of them, if you can afford that.”

  There is a slight grumble in the audience.

  “Or fluidly. More fluidly than before, one can stretch it slowly back and forth to meet with just about any place that strikes your interest. Timing is of the essence, and particularly those who like that kind of thing, or cheese or hats. Cheese or hats are preferable because they are smaller and don’t cause so much trouble when you try to put them in the case when you pack up.”

  The grumbling grows louder.

  “You can take these vectors and measure them. But if you do I hope you have kept the string that I mentioned earlier. You might all want to make a note of this now.”

  Someone in the back yells something angrily. People around him tell him to be quiet.

  “You can pile these vectors on top of each other. It really does depend a lot on what your budget is. The bell is ringing. Just like for dinner. In all forms of theater, and in most recording processes, a small barking dog or an accident on the highway can be measured, especially by someone who really cares about these things, and you have to have a large pot or some form of hamburger. Hamburger that you can see all over the highway.”

  The angry man yells again. Another angry man stands up and yells something from the other side of the hall. People tell them to be quiet. But what is odd to me, is that the people silencing the angry men sound angry as well, like they are defending me.

  “Five, six, seven, red, green, blue. It really is all that it takes to have something really beautiful stretched out to the length of your arm. You can be sure of the result of pancakes.”

  There is more shouting. Back and forth. Some people are enjoying this immensely, they are beaming.

  “Five, six, seven, red, green, blue. It really is all that it takes to have something really beautiful stretched out to the length of your arm. You can be sure of the result.”

  A fight breaks out.

  I continue.

  “We all take the measurements very seriously, and you can almost apply the same methods as you do when making pancakes at home with your children. God bless the children is what I always say, though they can be very messy.”

  As the ushers break up the first fight, another fight has started. And then a third fight starts, this one involving several people.

  I go on like this for exactly forty-five minutes.

  “Hamburger on the highway or other places can be gathered into large piles and then set on fire.

  “Thank you!”

  Several people stand up and applaud wildly. Several others are yelling in anger.

  My escort says that she is in the back by the row of translation booths. When I finish, the doors fly open in a mad panic. The translators, those poor translators, mostly small balding men but a couple of plump women, race to get out of their little booths. They are gasping for air. They are drenched in sweat and mopping their brows.

  One man is trembling.

  I am on the cover of all the papers the next day. Most of the papers use a mad scientist photo of me,
where I am holding a pair of headphones and my wind-up clock, staring at them like I have never seen more bizarre objects in my life.

  26

  Socks! Socks! Socks!

  It really was a jail, where Liz went. She had decided to put herself in a rehab facility in New Hampshire. It wasn’t one of these twenty-eight day places. It was for an indeterminate amount of time and they decided when you could leave. The people in this facility were mostly felons who’d had a choice between jail and this place and had made the horrible mistake of choosing the latter.

  They weren’t patients, they were inmates.

  I talked to Chickie Lucas about it. Chickie had been a tough New York kid and had ended up in one of these places years before. And when I say “tough,” I mean it in the best way. In order to be real, you almost have to be tough. Otherwise you are just a puff person with no real ability to stand up cleanly.

  Chickie was a few years older than me, had mellowed a bit, but was still really solid. He told me, with his snaggly, rascal grin, that they had made him mop all the floors wearing diapers. That they just tried to break you, but that probably it was a good place for Liz.

  A few years later Chickie died in a motorcycle accident. He died way too young. I loved Chickie Lucas, but I suppose this was the perfect way for him to go.

  I always thought that if Liz could straighten up, we could make it work. But I didn’t want her spirit broken. Her spirit was what I was in love with. I just didn’t want her to be a lying junkie anymore.

  At first, they let me write letters, but when I mentioned that I had gotten high once, they wouldn’t let her see my letters anymore.

  Months went by and they wouldn’t let me communicate with her at all. I started to go nuts having these people blocking me from talking to her.

  On her birthday, I looked into renting a helicopter so I could fly over the place with a megaphone but learned that that was illegal in numerous ways.

  Liz’s brother, John, came out to Brooklyn to inspect her giant pile of stuff, to see if there was anything she might want. He looked at the enormous heap and was dumbfounded.

  “How does anyone live like this? What should I take?” He didn’t really want to deal with it. Didn’t want to take anything. I saved her little stuffed horse that she had had since she was a little girl and made John take it, at least, and her fur hat.

  I was on the rebound and lost.

  I had been dubbed the sexiest, coolest man in New York, which basically meant in the world, and I was a mess. While people on the outside saw my life as a wonderful, wonderful thing, I was a mess.

  * * *

  —

  I devoured everything that was put in front of me. Girls, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs. I went to Area, the new club, every night. Every night I would leave as the club closed at four a.m., high on coke and drunk and with a new beautiful woman on my arm.

  If I walked out without a beautiful woman on my arm, the bouncers would be shocked and comment on it in disappointment.

  “You’re leaving alone? Oh no! Not possible!”

  There was an Italian American girl who worked as a bartender there named Mercedes. She was an exquisite beauty with dark hair, lips to write poems about, and a slight New Orleans accent. Jean-Michel said, “Mercedes was the hottest girl in town. All the boys were talking about her.” And she was. Mercedes was the hottest girl in town.

  I was shy to approach her. But then I was driving the Gold Cadillac Beast up First Avenue and this car swerved in front of me. I saw Mercedes scramble over the passenger seat into the back of the car. She was smiling and waving and yelling instructions to the driver, all at the same time.

  But she was still too much. A girl like this just could not be interested in me. She was the best girl.

  We played in New York, and the number of beautiful women available to me after the show was ridiculous. After that show, Mercedes’s friend Karen came backstage and gave me Mercedes’s phone number on a crumpled piece of paper, like we were in high school.

  After the show someone gave me a bag of brown dope. I had pretty much cleaned myself up but snorted it. This was headache dope.

  I spent the night at Mercedes’s place. She was asking me questions and I was going on and on about myself. “Aren’t I great?”

  My head was just killing me. I was sitting on her bed holding my temples, groaning a bit.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  “I just want you to feel better.”

  What a nice answer. It sounded like she meant it.

  In the morning, we went in my Gold Cadillac Beast out to Brooklyn, but first I had to stop at the magazine stand and pick up an article about me that had just come out. Mercedes read the article out loud to me while I was driving over the bridge. She had that New Orleans accent, that lilt in her voice that eased out of her exquisite lips. But I was horrified. All my answers were the exact same things that I had said to her the night before. I was really becoming something exceptionally cheap.

  We go out to Brooklyn and sleep. When we wake up, I pick her up off the floor, with my arms under the backs of her knees, and throttle her quite properly. I have my elbows under her knees and am holding her up against the wall. I am thinking, Damn, this is how they fuck in the movies. Look at you.

  But this is the first and last time.

  Next time I see her, something is up with my body, maybe due to my recent two week dip into heroin, I’m not sure why, but I can’t get a proper hard-on. It just lies there like a squishy little thing. It gets a little life and flops around, but basically it’s useless. I can’t do it.

  Then it happens again! Next time I see her it happens again! I can’t fucking believe it. She is not sympathetic, whatsoever, and makes no attempt to put some life into the poor fallen warrior. She looks at me with disgust, then my cock withers a bit more and tries to hide up inside my stomach.

  The whole thing with Mercedes only lasts a couple of weeks. I get hung up on her very quickly. While I’m sitting in the car out by my place in Brooklyn, I have this image of her walking down the street carrying our kid.

  You have to be careful where the heart takes you when you are on the rebound.

  She says she can’t see me one night and won’t say why. I park a block away from her apartment and watch her window. Pathetic. Stupid too, because you could see my giant Gold Cadillac Beast from space.

  I know I don’t have a chance. If you can’t really fuck somebody, and all you can produce is Mr. Flaccid, you cannot hope to be taken seriously.

  We have a gig at some city-sponsored outdoor event on the river, downtown. It’s in the afternoon, and no one is going to see the band because everyone is going to see the Jean-Michel Basquiat–Andy Warhol show. At least no one I care about outside of my sister, Liz, who is down from Boston.

  On top of that, this is the show where the poster is the two of them in Everlast boxing shorts with gloves on. My idea. And I am furious that Jean-Michel is doing our idea with Andy instead of me, and then Mercedes goes to the gallery opening instead of coming to see the band play. I am hurt and I am angry.

  The show is over by the Hudson River, and afterward, I drive my giant Gold Cadillac Beast in circles at sixty miles an hour in an empty lot next door, bringing up a giant dust cloud. My sister, Liz, watches and is a little worried. Liz once had a dream that I was angry and going from room to room. After I left each room, it exploded.

  Mercedes gets immediately fed up with me. She keeps doing things that upset me and I keep getting inordinately angry every time. Mercedes is used to being the terror in her relationships and isn’t having it from me.

  I am also becoming massively insecure from kicking heroin for the nine thousandth time. Early on, cocaine and heroin allow you to have an erection for four hours without coming. You have to piss standing on your head. But now I can’t get a hard-o
n and I am so insecure that no one could possibly want to have anything to do with me.

  I see her at Area about a week later. I tell her we need to talk. I am doing better. I’m thinking that I need a chance to show her how fantastically my penis is finally working now that I have kicked. She says she’s leaving soon. We can talk outside.

  I wait outside. Twenty minutes go by. I’m just standing outside waiting amid the stragglers vying to be let into the club. Finally, she comes out.

  “What are you doing? I’ve been out here half an hour.”

  “I didn’t tell you to wait,” she says.

  I want to scream that my cock is working now and she has to check it out. But I can’t do that in front of the bouncers. I am their hero.

  I am about to get furious, but she just walks off. I guess any chance that I had with this girl is through.

  I wonder if I invented Mercedes, if, outside of her extraordinary beauty, she is not remotely the person that I created in my head. In actual fact, I am in love with Liz and just have nowhere to go with it. Or maybe that is bullshit. I have no idea why I couldn’t get a hard-on. I had no problem on that first day. It only happened twice with Mercedes, but all that week my cock wasn’t behaving properly, even when I was alone and tried to jerk off. Jerking off is something that I am very good at. Who the fuck knows? Because Mercedes, in her way, is very, very special.

  In any case, after that night at Area, I am pretty morbid about all of this and go back out to Brooklyn. Can’t sleep. I get up to drive into Manhattan to get something to eat, as the sun is coming up. The car won’t start. It’s completely dead.

  I go to take the bike out of the trunk. I had bought this beautiful expensive bike that I would bring into Manhattan in the trunk, then find parking I didn’t have to pay for and use my bike. Kind of loved this bike. Just so smooth, how it rode.

  That bike could go so fast. I would always be weaving in and out of traffic, going much faster than the cars. Once I was racing down Seventh Avenue ahead of the cars as the light at Fourteenth Street turned yellow. I raced to make the light but saw this giant divot in the pavement. I was going too fast to avoid it. I went down into the divot and then the bike catapulted up, high, into the air. I managed to let go of the bike and land on my feet, running to keep up with my momentum. The bike smashed around between my legs, cutting my pants and ripping up my legs. People who were standing on Fourteenth Street watching this, as the bike flew through the air, applauded wildly when I was able to stay upright without getting really hurt.