The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  I hesitated putting this story in the book. That is not who he was, but it is who he was that night.

  Andy Warhol’s death had really destroyed him. I think hardly anyone saw him after that.

  He fell into heroin pretty hard, but then I heard he had kicked in Hawaii.

  He had called me from there. He was freaking out, crying and crying. He was going to quit the art world. This same exact thing had happened once before when he was in Italy.

  He begged me to come to Hawaii. He’d send me a ticket. I couldn’t decide whether or not to go. Sounded like he really needed me to come, but it was bad timing for me. I had rehearsals with the band coming up that I would have to cancel and all this music to sort out.

  He called again and begged me to come. I was leaning toward going. Okay, he would call me tomorrow.

  I talked to Torton about it: “What should I do? It sounds like he really needs me to come.” Finally I decided to go, but then Jean-Michel never called back and I had no way to reach him.

  His talent was gigantic. More than anyone knows. And he had an amazing motor, would just paint all the time. Even when he was a kid, staying at my place. He would pick up my oil pastels and start painting on the side of a cardboard box or a napkin.

  I was poor and yelled at him for using up all my oil pastels. Too bad these art vultures weren’t around then. They would have bought him ten million dollars’ worth of oil pastels, enough to cover all of Third Street in oil pastels.

  Man, it is so ridiculous, what is happening now with Jean-Michel. Do you think a fraction of this idolatry, of this obscenity in the prices for his paintings, would be happening if he were still alive?

  America only loves its true artists when they are safely dead. When they are alive, they are much too dangerous.

  And what really is the shame of it all is that he died so young. That fame thing is really hard to adjust to. Takes a while before you can find yourself after it is on you. Even though many people think they want fame, it is not usually a good thing. If he had had time to sink back into who he was, if he had been allowed to mature a little, I’m sure he would have become something truly amazing. As cruel as he could be, he had a kind and beautiful heart, and I think the cruelty was just partly because of his youth.

  I’d go by his place on Third Street, the building that Andy Warhol set him up in, and he would have these paintings everywhere. Some just incredible. There was one, a skeleton with a halo, that just rocked me, and an elephant with a bunch of writing. I went home and worked on music for a while. When I came back, I asked where they were. I wanted to see them again. I had never done that before, asked him to pull out a painting I had seen earlier. Gives you an idea of how special they were.

  He had painted over them. I couldn’t believe it. Was almost angry at him about it.

  But he was never precious about his work. In a way, that kind of impressed me. Around that time, we had smoked some of his ridiculously strong weed and were boxing in slow motion, making the sound effects as we went.

  Whamp!

  He delivered an uppercut to my jaw and I went backward from the imaginary slow motion blow.

  Kapow!

  He delivered another slow motion blow to my midsection. As I stepped back, my foot landed in a tray of paint. Then he caught me with another solid punch to the body and I went back again, and stepped onto an almost finished canvas that was lying on the floor. Leaving a big paint footprint.

  I was horrified. “Oh, Willie! I am so sorry, man!”

  But he just laughed. He didn’t say, “No, John, it’s okay.” He just laughed.

  Then we both laughed and went back to our slow motion boxing.

  Years later, after he was gone, I went up to the Guggenheim to see this enormous show of his. There was a painting with a footprint in it. Pretty sure it had to be the same painting.

  I stepped forward to show someone where my footprint was but was not even past the velvet rope thing. I just leaned in a bit and pointed. Guards swooped in from all directions.

  “Sir! Sir! Stay back from the painting!”

  “I—”

  “Sir! Back away from the painting!”

  I swear, if they equipped these guys with guns, they would have shot me.

  They didn’t believe me when I explained that I had already stepped on this valuable thing they were now protecting.

  * * *

  —

  I was jealous about that too, I suppose. He was living in his muse, twenty-four hours a day—if a painting got ruined, fuck it, another would flow out—while I was having to run the band, trying to collect money owed from the last tour, trying to get the right drums for Zurich, making sure everyone had their passport, or explaining to a musician how a calendar works. I resented it, and he was living in his muse.

  It was devouring my soul and I was losing my magic. I wasn’t living in it. I was suffering, and he seemed to take pleasure in that, which I hated. Like that fate could never have befallen him.

  We always fought. Then we would go around and badmouth each other, and it was just stupid.

  I was talking shit about him one day when Torton turned to me and said, “Jean-Michel tells people that you are the only artist equal to him.”

  I suppose that was why we always fought. We were competitive. I never really had that with anyone else, not like that.

  The guy was amazing. I loved him. With all the assholes in the world, especially leeching around that scene, why fight with him?

  Another time, after another falling out, I wrote him a long letter saying that I loved him. That I would not badmouth him, not ever again. With all these creeps out there, why would I attack someone as beautiful as him?

  He didn’t write back. The next time I saw him, which was a long time later, he didn’t say anything about the letter. I didn’t want to, but I finally asked him, “Did you get the letter I sent you six months ago?”

  “Yeah.”

  For a moment, he looked at the floor and didn’t say anything. Then he said, “I cried,” then walked away.

  In the video store where he refused to speak, just grinned but wouldn’t talk, that was the last time I saw him.

  34

  My Friends Cover Their Faces

  When I was in Morocco doing The Last Temptation of Christ, this French guy recognized me in the marketplace and said that I had to hear the Gnawa music. I never open up to situations like this, when someone tells me there is music I “have to hear,” unless it’s Evan. The amount of times people have been correct in the past is next to zero.

  But there was something about the French guy, who looked more Gypsy than French. It seemed like maybe I should pay attention. A spark behind the eyes and a worldly understanding that seemed to go beyond his years. One of those people who learn how to enjoy life by paying attention to it.

  He said he knew two of the best Gnawa musicians, who happened to be in Marrakech at this time. He could bring them to my hotel room if I wanted. I could play with them, or they could just come and smoke kif with me and play on their own.

  Gnawa musicians are part of a nomadic tribe that lives in tents and travels around North Africa performing rituals of dance and music. The dance is something where they whip themselves into a frenzy of possession and is amazing to witness.

  These two Gnawa guys came to my room and they were just beautiful. So sweet and respectful that it broke my heart. One of them played this homemade half-bass, half-guitar instrument that had no frets, and the other one had little metal maraca-like things and sang.

  They both sat on the floor and we got stoned on kif. I took out my soprano and turned on my tape recorder. The little guy with the metal clacky things sang like he had a hole in his throat. It had the warmth of your father singing you to sleep. Sometimes the other would sing a response or repeat his phrase.

&n
bsp; What a gift this was.

  The music is fairly simple and modal. But it has an imploring tone that is beautiful. It is like the music is just gently asking, “Why, God? Why?,” acknowledging suffering but without complaining.

  I played with them and something happened for me. I had one of those moments. An epiphany. It was not my being influenced by what they were playing. It was the freedom and the very sweet and open vibe that they had brought that freed me up. Something changed in my playing that night and stayed changed.

  It was the purity in their reason for playing that really had hit me. That was what I wanted, more than anything: to be part of a tribe that played music for the right reason.

  Back in New York, I was writing a lot of music—bass parts, piano parts, guitar parts—to go with the melodies I was creating on the horn, but it somehow didn’t fit together rhythmically. Actually, it fit too well. I was working a lot in odd time signatures, and somehow if the tune or part of it was in 11/8, putting all the parts in 11/8 made it feel stilted.

  Dougie helped me make an enormous leap by saying if something was in 5/4, it wasn’t necessary for everything to be in 5/4. Dougie and Erik and I, and then later Marc and Evan, started working out stuff in multilayered rhythms. So part of the band would be in 6/8 and then maybe part of it would be in 5/4, and it created this kind of ocean of floating rhythm that gave the music life. It was really exciting. It was the first time, ever, that I felt, Yes! This is it! This is what I want it to sound like, and the ideas were flying out of me. And something else was happening: The music was getting pure. It was still crashing and irreverent, but at the same time it was becoming somehow spiritual. This was beautiful and unified the band in a nice way.

  We had a week booked at the hideous Knitting Factory, when it was still on Houston Street. The place was always filthy and seemed low-rent to me. I didn’t want to play there. Sound system was no good. Your place can have ripped upholstery and pieces of plaster falling off the ceiling, fine, as long as it sounds good there. But it didn’t.

  Yet, when the owner, Michael Dorf, said with such awe that if The Lounge Lizards ever played his club he could die after that, I fell for it and said okay. Dorf was a really miserable guy to deal with. His name entered the vocabulary of downtown musicians over the years as a replacement for screwed: “Oh, you got Dorfed.”

  So all nine of us crammed onto that tiny stage and played. There was no air. It was August, and so hot and crowded you couldn’t breathe. The audience was right up on you. I bought a canary and placed it on the stage, in a cage, like coal miners do, to test the air. The only good thing I have to say about the Knitting Factory is that the canary didn’t die.

  I’m getting ready to go to the show. Have my suit on, have shaved, am sitting on my bed rushing to get on my shoes. There is never enough time before a show to find a good reed and then be warmed up. I also have a superstition about not leaving my apartment a complete mess, so like Spalding Gray, I will start to leave the house and then decide I can’t leave the garbage tilting over and circle back to fix it.

  My other superstitions are that I can’t play onstage with money in my pocket, and my socks absolutely cannot have any holes in them. Pretty much the only thing Evan and I ever fought about on the road was socks.

  The phone rings. I try not to answer the phone before a show in New York because everyone is calling to be on the guest list. When we are playing in town, I change my answering machine message to, “If you want to be on the guest list for tonight’s show please leave your message BEFORE the beep.”

  This works. There are lots of exasperated gasps and then hang-ups but no one demanding free tickets to the show.

  It’s Gabrielle on the phone. That’s odd. I haven’t talked to Gabrielle in a really long time. Since she got straight and I was straight, we just fell out of touch, even though Gabrielle was one of the funniest people I’d ever met.

  “I’m sure you already heard.”

  “What?”

  “Jean-Michel Basquiat died.”

  “Really?”

  It’s just weird. Doesn’t make any sense. I haven’t seen him in a while. I heard that he’d kicked heroin in Hawaii.

  “How’d he die?”

  “They don’t know.”

  I don’t feel sad or anything. I just feel strangely off balance. I go and play the gig.

  I do remember, to this day, being in the middle of the concert, and for a moment the reality of it hit me. Jean-Michel is dead. Then going back into the music. The perfect place to go.

  * * *

  —

  A few years before, Jean-Michel had come to my house at four in the morning. He was in a horrible state. He was weeping and his nose was bleeding from taking too much coke. He was having his first big opening in New York. At first I thought it was anxiety about the show. But after some time it became clear it was that his father was coming.

  He was terrified of his father.

  Even so, when I heard that Jean-Michel’s father didn’t want his friends going to the funeral, I thought, Okay, I can respect that he wants a private funeral for the family. But then I heard that the big deals in the art world had been invited. This made me furious. For Jean-Michel’s funeral, the first thought is Best way to market his work?

  So I went, uninvited. I crashed the funeral. Fuck, he was my friend, perhaps my closest friend. I loved him.

  Someone had to be there who loved him.

  There were security guys outside of the funeral. They took one look at my face as I approached and moved out of my way. I guess it was clear it would be a mistake to try to stop me.

  The funeral wasn’t about Jean-Michel’s infectious, impish grin or his vulnerable pigeon-toed walk, which we would never see again. It wasn’t about how, except for the times when he appeared to be channeling Idi Amin, he could be the most beautifully warm thing ever on the planet. It was about something else altogether.

  I don’t know, maybe I am being unfair. I can’t tell people how to grieve. Sometimes when someone I care about dies, I get angry in all directions, especially if things seem phony.

  I felt the vibe on the way out.

  There was the line of people offering condolences to Gerard, Jean-Michel’s father, and I could just feel that heavy Basquiat vibe before I actually saw him seeing me.

  Gerard Basquiat stared at me. You are unwelcome here. Damn, an entire family that can channel Idi Amin.

  Why am I unwelcome here? I loved him. Fuck you and these pretentious art people on top of it. Fuck all of you.

  I don’t remember seeing any of the people who truly cared about Jean-Michel at the funeral, like Suzanne Mallouk or Jennifer Goode or Shenge or Torton, but I am not in the habit of taking inventory at funerals.

  They were all going somewhere after the funeral, I suppose the cemetery, but I bolted. Had to get away from it.

  I went outside, and as I turned the corner, I ran smack into the coffin as it was being taken out.

  Damn, that is Willie Mays in there.

  They placed the coffin down outside the hearse and I put my hand on it.

  Just at that solemn moment, I heard a shrieking voice, very loudly, go, “Oh my God! Is that him!?”

  It was Rene Ricard coming to the funeral an hour late. Rene, in his way, was an absolute genius. He also could be the most obnoxious person on the planet. At Bruce Balboni’s birthday party, when Bruce had OD’d and was put in the bathtub and being shot full of saline to revive him, Rene was the one who went around the party singing, “It’s my party and I’ll die if I want to.”

  I was almost surprised Rene didn’t scream out, “This is fabulous!” as he stood over the coffin.

  I had a lot of affection for Rene, but I really did not want to see him at this moment and walked off, with a cold, ugly feeling inside me.

  My uncle Jerry had been sick wi
th lymphoma and was getting chemotherapy. I had been bad about going to see him. Kazu and I had gone up to his place on Central Park West about three weeks earlier, but I had only been up to see him once since he had been admitted to Roosevelt Hospital.

  Halfway through the evening that Kazu and I visited, he’d started having violent pain in his back. I’d called his doctor on his instruction and was told to get him over to Roosevelt Hospital, take him in via the emergency room entrance.

  Except, I was told at the emergency room that they had no rooms at the moment. He would have to wait. He was on a gurney, pushed against the hallway wall, with people rushing past us constantly, in all directions.

  There was nowhere for us to stand. We were in the way, so after an hour, we left him, writhing in pain, on the hospital gurney in the hallway. And since then I had only been up to visit him one time. So I felt terrible about that and thought, as I walked with Jean-Michel’s coffin behind me, I’d walk through Central Park and go visit my uncle Jerry.

  When I got to Roosevelt, I saw Nina, a friend of my uncle’s, through the glass entrance. Nina was crying. She was weeping in that really deep, uncontrollable way that can only mean one thing.

  I realized that Jerry was gone.

  I don’t know what happened next. I found myself ten blocks away on Fifty-seventh Street. I had no idea how I had gotten there. I’d lost the jacket and tie that I had worn to Jean-Michel’s funeral, and my white shirt was in complete disarray.

  It was too much. My brain had diswired. I walked back to the hospital and someone handed me my jacket.

  “I want to see him.”

  “No, you don’t want to see him.”

  I just kept wondering if he was scared. I hoped he wasn’t scared.

  Jerry’s answer, if you told him that you believed that there was something after this life, was, “Well, that’s good for you. I don’t, but if you believe it, then for you it is true.”

  He was such a sweet man. Just a good New York Jewish lawyer who did a lot of things for a lot of people. A breed that doesn’t exist anymore. There is a line in that movie The Pledge, where Jack Nicholson says to Sam Shepard, “I give you my word. You’re old enough to remember when that meant something.” That was my uncle. He was like that. Old school.