The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  There is a little hole under the trunk lock that I never noticed before. Open the trunk and the bike is gone. Stolen.

  The car is dead. I have to pay $60 to have it taken away.

  The girl, the bike, the car, all gone. Comes in threes.

  Jim has written a new script, Down by Law. He has actually written this one. A prison movie in New Orleans with Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni, and me.

  I’m not sure I want to do it. I didn’t like so many things about how Stranger went.

  But this pays $50,000. Fuck, $50,000. I kind of have to do it. I am broke and it’s not like I’m selling my soul to do it.

  I have a big problem with the fact that this is basically the same character I played in the other movie, and the way things were presented, people seemed to believe that that character was me and I didn’t like that at all.

  When Jim says that I can write some scenes for the guy to give him a different twist, I agree to do it.

  The band plays the night before I leave for New Orleans to do Down by Law. I am pretty down about Liz and Mercedes. I am down about pretty much everything. Just as the music is starting to become something really special, no one wants to know about it. The only thing people are interested in is the movies.

  The jazz world cannot possibly give us credit for making breakthroughs in their field. We started off so irreverently, being basically a punk band, that many will not look at what we’re doing now with an open mind. Plus, I’m in a movie that’s getting all this attention, so at best, I must be a dilettante of some kind, and the jazz purists want nothing to do with me.

  Years after I became unable to play because of Lyme disease, we released a record of the trio playing live. And all the jazz press were wildly praising my playing, and it pissed me off. Where were they when this could have helped?

  Lester Bangs wrote that The Lounge Lizards were “staking out new territory that lies somewhere west of Charles Mingus and east of Bernard Herrmann.” But he was the only one who gave us any legitimacy back at that time.

  There is a party arranged for me after the show. I go to the party and it turns out that they are charging people to get in. This isn’t really a party for me. They are getting people to pay to go to their party by telling people I will be there. No one I know is there.

  Life feels corrupt and hollow. And remarkably lonely.

  * * *

  —

  I get to New Orleans and can’t believe it. This hotel, now called the Bayou Plaza, is the hotel my family lived in for a while when I was six. We had moved from Minneapolis to New Orleans before we moved into a house on Peggy Avenue. A house with banana trees lining the backyard, with lizards and tree frogs everywhere.

  It’s November and I’m happy to be in the warm, muggy South.

  My character is a pimp, and I want to meet and hang out with a pimp, or pimps, to see how it works.

  Actually, how does it work? Why do prostitutes have these guys they end up giving all their money to? It has never made any sense to me.

  Through a bunch of clandestine maneuvers, I get hooked up with this guy Angelo. Angelo is five foot ten and built like a rock. He has black eyes and is very tough. His ethnicity is impossible to figure out. He takes me around to all these different bars on the outskirts of New Orleans. Everywhere we go, he tells me to wait at the bar, and then he goes off and huddles with some guy or other, whispering, and then comes back. I don’t have a clue what’s going on. He told me his name was Angelo, but at every single bar we enter, they call him something else: Gino, Stoney, Sonny, Ricky, but never Angelo. I don’t learn much, except that however I approach being a pimp in the movie is going to be my own invention.

  Ellen Barkin is in the beginning of the movie. This is impressive. Ellen Barkin is actually a real actor.

  I’ve been working out for the first time in fifteen years. We’re at a restaurant and I say that I have to go to the gym.

  Barkin says, “Why you going to the gym? I thought you were too cool for that.”

  “I want to have some muscles in the movie, so I can be a movie star, like you.”

  She looks at my emaciated frame and says, “Where are you going to put them?”

  Benigni is a ray of light, hardly speaks any English, but clearly has a remarkable mind.

  He is also a rascal and an irritant. A school where I am a founding member.

  I start teaching him wrong English, explaining that it’s slang. One time, he gets up from the table and says he has to use the bathroom, and I explain, “The correct way to say that is, ‘I am going to flam.’ ”

  Later, the camera and lights are ready and they call for Roberto to do a scene.

  He says, “One moment, I must to flam.” The crew looks confused.

  He catches on pretty quickly, and then I can’t tell him anything, no matter how sincere my attempt is to help him with his English.

  The line producer had an assistant who was exceptionally smart. I found her really attractive. I found out that her name was Lisa Krueger.

  We had talked a couple of times and she seemed completely uninterested. When we were in the hotel bar after shooting, I watched her, and when our eyes met she looked away immediately. Seemed to me as though she was recoiling in horror.

  A couple of days later she was at the bar. I went up to her and said, “Let’s flirt.” There was a pause, so I said, “You go first.” She liked that. She later explained that she did not want to go on location and sleep with one of the lead actors, it was garish and just too cliché.

  So I was sleeping with Lisa, but we didn’t want anyone to know. She had to get up early and sneak back to her room before the rest of the crew got up. Once, when I slept in her room, I was cutting across the courtyard enclosed by the hotel to get back to my room. As the first crack of light moved across the lawn, I ran into Claire Denis.

  I had emphatically told Jim that he had to use Claire as assistant director, after watching her work on Paris, Texas.

  I said, “Claire, don’t tell anybody.”

  She laughed. “John, I am the first one up and every morning I see ten different people sneaking across this courtyard.”

  I really had a strong respect for Claire. She had that roll up your sleeves thing when she was working on a movie that felt more like she was going to war. Which is good, because it can be war. There are people who overdo that kind of thing, but Claire was going to war and calm about it. However, should anything arise, Claire would be ready. You just knew it.

  The Red Hot Chili Peppers are in New Orleans to do a gig. I sit in and play the whole show on alto. I don’t know the material, but the grooves are great and it’s easy and fun to play along with.

  The show’s over and we go back into the dressing room. They aren’t so big yet, this is not an arena, but there are a thousand people screaming for an encore. In the dressing room the band all start frantically ripping off their clothes.

  “Socks! Socks!”

  “Socks!”

  I don’t know what’s going on. No one says anything to me and they’re in a mad dash to take off their clothes.

  “Socks! Socks!”

  Each of them pulls a sock over his cock and balls, so that they’re naked except for the socks.

  I’m not prepared for this.

  They run back out onstage. The crowd roars!

  I think to myself that I can’t do the whole show and not do this, and I take off my clothes as fast as I can. I’ve got these long, almost knee-high socks from Barneys that I’m wearing. When I put one on over my cock it hangs down almost to my knees. There’s a guy standing by the side of the stage wearing sunglasses, and I grab them off his head as I pass.

  The sunglasses help.

  They start the song and I come running out and join in. It’s impressive how energetically one can play when standing naked in front
of a crowd.

  Rockets Redglare is at the concert. He’s doing a part in Down by Law. Rockets is gigantically overweight, maybe four hundred pounds, at the time.

  I don’t know this then, but Rockets sees me and my sock hanging prodigiously low and laughs so hard that he can’t breathe. He collapses, but he’s too heavy to be moved outside and they spread a circle around him on the floor so he can get some air, as the concert goes on around him.

  The song ends and Flea comes over to me and says, “There’s a vocal breakdown in the next song where you should lay out. I’ll cue you.”

  I nod. They start and I’m playing, everything is fine, it’s exhilarating. Flea cues me and they break down. Bump ba bump…bump ba bump…bump ba bump.

  I’m not playing. What am I supposed to do? Dance? That’s out of the question. I’m not going to stand up here and dance naked. Nope.

  So I run off the stage.

  It’s uncanny how humans have this animal sense to know when they are being watched. One can feel a glance or a stare. Like when you’re driving on the highway and passing another car, if you look at the other driver, even before you have pulled alongside them, they will turn and look at you defensively. Before you are even in their eye line. This is, inevitably, true. How do they know you’re there? They don’t look at every car that passes them, only if you’re staring. It really is some animal thing.

  I feel a thousand pairs of eyes burning on my ass as I dash from the stage.

  Hillel Slovak is immensely proud of me because I’m the only person who has ever sat in with the band and then done the sock thing.

  * * *

  —

  Down by Law seemed really stiff early on. The dialogue just seemed like a ton of exposition and not much else, though Robby Müller was certainly making it look astounding. Then Roberto walked into it and just freed it up completely. Some people just know their way around a camera. He knew how to do that, but he also could light up a room somehow.

  When I saw Paris, Texas, I was astounded by what Robby Müller had done. I had never seen anything like it.

  When I saw the dailies on Down by Law, I was astounded all over again. He was doing something incredible, but now in a completely different way.

  Early on in the movie, he had flown a young woman in from L.A. She was not his girlfriend or wife or anything like that. On Thanksgiving, after watching the Knicks beat the Celtics at the bar, I went back to my room. There was a knock on the door and this woman Robby had flown in from L.A. walked past me into the room.

  She walked drunkenly past me into the room, smiled, and sat on the chair.

  I didn’t know what the hell to do. This wasn’t right. I was with Lisa Krueger and this woman was with Robby. What was she doing?

  I couldn’t throw her out. It just felt awkward as hell.

  Then there was a loud smashing on my door. It was Robby. He dragged the woman, forcibly, out of my room.

  The next day we were filming out in the woods after Tom and Roberto and I had escaped from jail.

  The shot was ready to go, but Robby insisted that we wait until he set up a branch on a stand. It took twenty minutes.

  I saw later that the purpose of this branch was to cast a mottled shadow over my face. So that I looked kind of like a diseased monster.

  He never forgave me for what happened. And I don’t know how else I could have handled it.

  Robby was a true artist. But we never got along and it all goes back to that day. Even years later when we were both on the jury at a film festival.

  But damn, I have met a lot of artists in my life, and I don’t think anyone was as impeccable as Robby Müller.

  It was nice with Lisa Krueger. She was sane and really smart and thoughtful. And she knew music. Lisa was someone you could marry, but I was too stupid to see that then. I was in a tornado of lasciviousness. The fame threw my whole thing off balance. Beautiful women wanting to be with you, everywhere you go, is something every man thinks he would want. But it all felt cheap in the end. I lost my balance. The cocaine and alcohol probably didn’t help. And what the hell was I doing acting? I should have been playing music.

  My favorite part of making Down by Law was at the end of the movie when we were shooting in the swamps in Slidell. Tom, Roberto, and I would be driven out to the set in a little motorboat early every morning. The boat would putter out, and we would sing together as we watched the wildlife and the sun came up.

  We were always looking for alligators, which we never saw. Roberto would jump up and point at a stick and then say, “There an alli…” Then his voice would fall and he’d say, “No.” Over and over again. He knew that he hadn’t seen an alligator, he was just being silly and he should consider himself lucky that I didn’t throw him out of the boat after the seventh time.

  Once when I flew to L.A. with him, he was really tired on the plane. Couldn’t get him to talk to me, no matter how much I bugged him. Right before the plane landed he drank a double espresso. We were in the cab and I was tired, but now, Roberto was zooming. He was reading every sign in loud—very loud—very bad English.

  “La Cienega Boulevard!!”

  “No Left Turn!!”

  “Dry Cleaning!! One Hour!!”

  “Pizza!”

  I said, “Stop it!”

  “Harry’s Heroes!! 431-9007!!”

  “Basta!!”

  “We deliver!!”

  “Basta!”

  * * *

  —

  We’re out in Slidell shooting and this local guy stops by. Tom Waits and I are talking to him for a while. Seems okay. Tom asks him about a restaurant we’ve heard of for catfish, just down the road.

  “Nah, you don’t want to go there. Niggers go there.”

  I’m shocked. I’ve never heard that before, just used casually in a sentence like that. Violence rises up inside me.

  Tom just looks down at the ground and then walks away.

  I’m really disappointed in Tom, thinking, No, Tom. We have to fix this.

  I look at the guy and angrily say, “Listen…”

  The guy is tilting his head and looking at me, waiting to hear what I am going to say. He has no idea why I am upset.

  But then what? I say, “We don’t use that word, we find it vile”? Nah, that isn’t going to get through to him. It will be like trying to teach Mandarin to a squirrel.

  “I’m offended by what you said and that is why I am going to hit you in the head with this rock”?

  No, that wouldn’t quite work.

  So I do what Tom did. I look at the ground and walk away.

  I thought about it for years afterward, what I could have done to make some kind of an impression on this guy, but never figured it out.

  27

  What Do You Know About Music? You’re Not a Lawyer

  In Thailand, one can hear laughter floating through the air, like a birdcall. Like life.

  In Africa, one hears rich laughs that burst from the depths of soulful humans.

  In Wales, the laughs have an up and down, singsong affect.

  In Cuba and much of the Caribbean, it is much the same but different. There is music in it.

  In expensive restaurants in New York, it is the tight-lipped sound of people who laugh from the neck up. There is no solar plexus in the laugh. It is only what they believe to be laughter.

  One can learn pretty much everything about a person’s soul from the openness of their laugh.

  Naná Vasconcelos had the best laugh.

  I got them to hire Lisa Krueger to be my assistant when I was doing the music for Down by Law, which was great because she was smart and knew music. Late one afternoon, I was hanging out with Naná Vasconcelos, the great Brazilian percussionist, and Arto Lindsay at my place. We were fooling around, recording numerous outgoing messages on my a
nswering machine with me talking and Arto and Naná singing my phone number. Arto suggested that we go into the studio that night and record the score for Down by Law.

  It was kind of a naïve suggestion. There is so much red tape involved in scoring a movie, even on this level. The music is timed carefully to the scene in the movie. But then I thought, What the hell, we could go and play and probably get something. It would hardly cost anything; we could just try some stuff and maybe it would work for the scenes in the swamp.

  I was pretty sure that the producers would never say yes, but Lisa got them to okay it, and we went out to Martin Bisi’s studio in Brooklyn, where we had recorded “Hammerhead.” It went great. Arto and Naná had a real thing together. Got three or four of the twenty cues done in a way that never would have happened otherwise.

  I knew roughly what the money was and went to Naná and asked if $250 would be okay.

  Naná, who normally got real money to record anything, didn’t complain, didn’t say anything. He just laughed. He laughed like it was the funniest thing that he’d ever heard in his life. Kept laughing and laughing. He hadn’t done it for the money in the first place, but now that it was mentioned, that was something else.

  “Three hundred and fifty?”

  He threw back his head and laughed harder.

  This is the absolute best negotiating tool I have ever encountered, and I got Lisa to get him five hundred, which probably still wasn’t enough to make him stop laughing.

  The rest of the music I did a week or so later. We only had enough money for one day of rehearsal and I was trying to race through it.