The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  Both Roberto and Nicoletta can be hard to read, like if they want to hide something they can do that like world class poker players. I asked them, “Do you hide my ashtray in the basement and drag it out when I come to visit?”

  They both said no in a way that I believed, but I am not certain.

  When Roberto was not working, he slept for twenty hours straight. Never saw anything like it.

  Then he would drink three very strong espressos and dash out to play poker until ten or so the next morning. Come back as white as a ghost. He would never tell me if he’d won or not, but he sure as fuck did not have the look of somebody who had won.

  I wanted, badly, to go and play. But he absolutely could not be convinced to take me. It was out of the question. I almost had the feeling that this was how he got off, like a masochistic poker loser.

  I hope not, but that did seem to be what it was.

  Roberto is really something. I wish the United States had gotten the chance to see who he actually is. There is a great wisdom and beauty. But when Life Is Beautiful was getting all the attention and he was on TV all the time, he really didn’t speak English. It wasn’t an act.

  I have been on TV shows in places where I don’t speak the language. It is very difficult. You have no idea what is going on.

  So he did that irritating clown act on all the TV shows, and people got fed up with him very quickly, and I don’t blame them. It is just a shame it went like that. He has an important mind.

  I loved the housekeeper, Pina. She did my laundry and cooked for me. She was like a mom.

  One morning, while Roberto and Nicoletta were out of town, I spent a wild night with a sex beast named Barbara. We drank and snorted coke all night. She lived somewhere on the outskirts of Rome.

  She fell asleep and I could not, so the next morning, I left. But had no idea where I was. I walked and walked on a road made of dust until I finally found civilization and a taxi.

  I arrived at the house completely disheveled. I was ashamed for Pina to see me like this.

  She smiled, said something in Italian about the life of a young man, and made me breakfast without my asking.

  Roberto and Nicoletta thought I had come to visit them, but I really had come to visit Pina.

  After that I went to Grottaglie, a small town near Bari on the coast of Italy, to see Antonio, the sweet set designer from The Little Devil. Antonio had converted an old church into his home and it was beautiful, always filled with flowers. The church was made of stone and cool inside on sweltering days. And flowers. There were always flowers.

  I was supposed to meet Julie Caiozzi in Marseille after the tour, but I made the mistake of canceling on her.

  Julie was pissed. There were a lot of women that perhaps I should have married in this life. Julie Caiozzi is at the very top of the list. She was sexy as hell and understood the weirdness of life.

  I called her years later. She had the same number. I think she had had a kid—not sure how I knew that—but I just picked up the phone to call her. It was late at night in New York. I was in the middle of negotiating a film score deal, can’t remember which one, but I was on Church Street, so I guess it was Get Shorty.

  I mentioned the problems I was having and she just started to laugh. At me. And there was so much wisdom in her laugh. Like, John, they are going to pay you a quarter of a million dollars to write music? You have a roof over your head? You have food? You don’t have a child who is sick? What are you complaining about?

  She didn’t actually say any of that. She didn’t have to. It was in the kindness and the wisdom in her laugh.

  I slept very well at Antonio’s. The only place I have ever slept better was in a bedroom at Flea’s old place that he called “The Secret Room.” The room was like a little bunker of a womb and I slept perfectly there.

  I woke up one morning at Antonio’s with the idea firmly implanted in my mind of making a western, starring Roberto. I know I mentioned it earlier, but this is when it happened. I saw the whole thing—the outfits, the horses. No story, but everything else, the two of them walking horses across a landscape that looked like Africa.

  This came to me so strongly that I had to do it. There are those moments in music or in painting, where a thing floats in and is somehow complete. And it is very much not really yours. It is a gift. And this was like that.

  The idea of a surreal western bumped around in my head for a while. Something, also from the dream, demanded that the title had to be You Stink Mister. I don’t know why, and had to figure out a way to work that in.

  I spent a lot of summers in Italy after tours. Playing there was usually a disaster. Something, technically, was always horribly wrong. But I love Italy so much, to just be there.

  We were playing in an outdoor place in Florence, in the middle of the summer. When we arrived for sound check, the row of floodlights was raised to only six and a half feet above the ground. They were hovering about two feet out in front of my and Curtis’s heads when we stepped up to the mic to play.

  The band does the sound check and I ask to have the lights raised so I can see what it’s going to look like. There isn’t usually time to check the lights, because sound check is always late and chaotic, and the most important thing is to get the sound right. But it is always best to check the lights with the local lighting technician to make sure he is not partial to mauve or fuchsia or strobe effects.

  I’m told that the lights can’t be moved.

  “Well, they are going to have to move. They can’t stay like that.”

  “Yes! Yes! Of course, the lights go up later!”

  When we arrive to do the show, the lights are still in the same place. The arm that raises them is broken and has apparently been broken all summer.

  So when we go out to play, there are spotlights inches from our faces. Feels like we are getting burned. But the worst thing is that, because it is outdoors on a hot summer night, some kind of giant diving bugs are bombing at our faces throughout the entire show.

  The Italians could always go way out of their way to make a fool of you and then laugh, like, John! You are taking yourself much too seriously! After two-inch bugs have been denting your forehead for the last three hours.

  But I liked vacationing there after the tours. It was in Grosseto that I discovered there was a buttero, an Italian cowboy, who was famous for beating Buffalo Bill in a cowboy contest. This was perfect for my western movie.

  I spent some time there with the writer Sandro Veronesi. I don’t know Sandro’s writing but he was very smart and curious. He was also ridiculously handsome.

  One night we were invited to this home that was basically a castle. A stone porch hung hundreds of yards over the sea below. It was the home of a famous producer and his aging movie star wife. The producer had a somewhat dubious reputation and was very involved in the porn world.

  They bring out the most incredible cocaine. I haven’t taken any in a while.

  As we’re about to leave, some harsh words are exchanged and then it turns into an ugly shouting match between Sandro and the producer. The Italian is going too fast for me to understand. I’d missed the beginning and now I have no idea what is going on. But veins are bursting out of both of their necks.

  We get in the car to drive off and I ask Sandro what the fuck that was about. He tells me that we were both supposed to have sex with the producer’s wife so he could watch. That he had shoveled out all this cocaine and thousand dollar bottles of wine and expected something in return. But Sandro could be a rascal and I have no idea whether or not he just made that up on the spot.

  The next morning, we get into Sandro’s father’s sailboat and he sails me over to Elba. I am so fucking hungover. I imagine I smell like a wet dog.

  We arrive at the beach in Elba and there is Titti Santini, my music promoter, standing on the beach.

&
nbsp; They really almost have to carry me up this very steep hill, and Titti plunks me down in this little apartment he has rented for me.

  I went for a week to Elba, and then I had to get to Paris to do this thing for Comme des Garçons. I had agreed to be a runway model. This was in September of 1989. I don’t know why I said yes to this.

  I liked Comme des Garçons clothes at the time, and I think Rei Kawakubo is a real artist, but I am opposed to fashion.

  When I think about important fashion statements, I think about when Dougie was playing drums with Iggy Pop, and the guitar player came into the dressing room with sandwiches taped all over his clothes and asked, “What do you think?”

  They paid really well and put you in a nice hotel, and Don Cherry and John Malkovich were doing it, so I said, “What the fuck, why not?”

  The insidious thing to me with fashion is that only really rich people can afford the stuff. And that is the real idea behind it. It has nothing to do with how the stuff looks, but it is a demarcation line between the rich and the poor. “I can afford this and thus I am better than you.” It doesn’t matter that the shirt looks like shit and has a toucan attached to the shoulder.

  There is a similar thing with the art world. “This piece of shit plastic dog has no inherent value, it is not beautiful or moving or even particularly well crafted. Its value is that it costs one hundred million dollars and I can afford it. And you cannot.”

  Fashion makes everybody insecure, or at least 98 percent of people. First, you are too poor to afford it. But more than that, it provokes insecurity because you feel you are too fat or too skinny or too short or your ass is too big, and you are clearly, overall, not good enough.

  You go into these stores and the salespeople look down their noses at you. It makes everyone nervous. I don’t know why they do it, because I would imagine that customers who are actually comfortable buy more clothing. It is about the salespeople themselves’ having to let you know that, for some unexplained reason, they are better than you.

  I remember going into Barneys once and the sales guy looking me up and down in disgust.

  And I started to feel insecure and uncomfortable. I didn’t buy anything, and on the way out, there was a picture of me in the elevator, wearing some suit. Like, Look at this elegant man, you too could look like him.

  Yet the sales guy made me so uncomfortable that I left. So if I am literally the model of what an elegant man looks like, how the fuck does Joe from next door or Sally from down the street deal with this shit? Because I, at least, have some ammunition to defend myself.

  “Come here, you pretentious salesfart. Look! That is me in the photo! I can’t be that disgusting.”

  But I am in Paris and I am a fashion model.

  The hotel they put me in is gorgeous. There is a note in the bathroom about calling the chambermaid when you are ready to have her draw your bath. People live like this?

  It is strange to walk out from behind a curtain onto a runway, where there are hundreds of Parisians sitting there examining your clothes with great discernment.

  I can’t stop laughing.

  I try not to laugh because everyone else is taking it all so seriously, like they are getting ready to meet the Pope.

  I also don’t want to offend Rei Kawakubo, because I really do respect her. She is an artist. But she gets a kick out of my irreverence for the whole thing. I reach into a cooler full of beers and get my sleeve all wet, right before I am supposed to model this outfit.

  She covers her mouth in that polite Japanese way so as not to let people see she was laughing.

  Each time that you go out on the runway, there is a smattering of applause for the clothes you are wearing.

  I bet Julian Sands and John Malkovich $500 that my clothes on the next trip out would get more applause. They agree. We shake on it.

  They both go out to their normal smattering. I go out, take two steps, and stop. Then I thump really hard on my chest, point to the clothes, and then throw my hands out, as though I have just been enormously triumphant in something. The crowd goes nuts. Mad applause.

  I get back behind the curtain and Sands and Malkovich both agree that I have won. They are a little shocked. They hadn’t seen what I had done because they were rushing to change into outfit seven.

  But that night, when they see the tape of the show, they refuse to pay because they say that what I had done wasn’t right. I really hate people who don’t pay their gambling debts. Because I won that bet and they knew I had done it quite fairly. They too had been free to thump their chests to advertise their outfits.

  I got in a little trouble because I said in an interview that France was changing its slogan from “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” to “We wore these clothes and then we died.” Then I left Paris.

  * * *

  —

  After Paris, I had to fly out to L.A. to do a little thing in Wild at Heart. I had met David Lynch years before when he was casting Blue Velvet. He was considering me for the part that Dean Stockwell ended up doing, lip-synching “In Dreams.”

  Thank God I didn’t get the part. Usually when I see an actor doing a thing that I have read or considered doing, I think, Ahh, he fucked it up, I would have killed it. But Dean Stockwell was so unbelievably great in that part, it would have been a true shame if the part had gone to me instead.

  Earlier that year, I had been up in Maine with Willem Dafoe and Liz LeCompte. Willem had a copy of the script that Lynch was doing next, Wild at Heart. I read it and was floored by it. The script was filled with pathos and beauty. Unfortunately this pathos and beauty are missing from the film.

  David Lynch is a very sweet, smart, and talented guy. A genuine human being. I preferred him immensely to other directors I had worked with.

  But Lynch had recently, repeatedly, been declared a genius. The result of this was that any idea that popped into his head was then stuffed into the movie with not the slightest attempt at discernment. Almost like he was going, Shit, I didn’t know I was a genius, but who am I to question that? I better put this speck of an idea in the movie.

  “For the next scene let’s have some naked fat ladies running through. And a fire eater!”

  With Nic Cage’s help, I thought they’d ruined one of the best scripts I’d ever read. I know there are people who love that movie, but that was what I thought.

  Anyway, that was how I ended up in the movie. I liked the script so much that I told Willem to tell David that if there was a little part in there for me, I would be happy to do it.

  * * *

  —

  Willem is staying at a hotel called L’Ermitage. It is expensive. They have the best lamb sausages on the breakfast menu.

  I have heard this many times since at hotels, but this is the first time I hear this thing, where you call to be connected to another room and they say, “My pleasure!” before connecting you. Feels strangely kinky.

  The hotel must have staff meetings where they discuss the guests and how to stroke their egos. Because I come in at four in the morning and the security guy is walking my floor. I feel a little like I don’t belong in this fancy hotel as he eyes me coming down the corridor.

  He gets closer to me and starts to hum a Lounge Lizards tune. First, this guy really doesn’t look like a Lounge Lizards fan, but the thing he is humming is from a record that has only been purchased by eleven people, and he doesn’t look like he could be one of the eleven.

  Willem is fun. He has to have these fucked up teeth and gums for the movie and he is wearing this plastic teeth thing all the time. He loves his plastic teeth thing. Sleeps with it in.

  My first day, they ask if I would mind driving out to the set myself, and also, would I mind picking up Pruitt Taylor Vince? A production assistant will come to my hotel and show me the way to Pruitt’s and then direct us to the set.

  I say o
kay to this because I like Pruitt. I did a scene with him in Down by Law that got cut out of the movie. Pruitt at that time was a local New Orleans actor and trying very hard to get a break. I thought the scene was fantastic, particularly Pruitt. Benigni was like this times a thousand, but Pruitt was really an actor. Had it down. My acting was so hit or miss; it was not really what I did, and I always appreciated people who had acted enough that there was something solid about it. That they knew their way around a camera.

  We drive over to Pruitt’s place and it takes forty-five fucking minutes to get there. The PA goes into the apartment building to get him. Then the PA comes back and we wait another forty-five minutes for Pruitt to get his fat ass ready to come out of his house.

  We drive out into the desert to where they are shooting. I can’t remember exactly what it was. The scene is no longer in the movie. There is a band playing in a garage behind us and we are supposed to be yelling over the sound of the band. The band isn’t actually playing. They are miming playing and the sound will be added later. So there is no sound to yell over.

  Nobody yells.

  Nic Cage comes in and talks in his normal voice and the guy answers him in a normal voice. When it comes my turn to speak, I’ll be damned if I am suddenly going to be the one who is yelling, so I talk in my normal voice.

  Lynch gets pissed at everybody for not yelling. We do the scene again and nobody yells.

  They’ll have to cut the scene because nobody is yelling. But that poor band, just like Pruitt in Down by Law. I know they were really psyched to be in the movie.

  And I kind of owe them something. The guy playing the harmonica gave me the one he was playing. It was just perfectly broken in. It lasted for years and had a deep, rich sound. It is the one I used when playing the harmonica solo in “I’m a Doggy” on the Marvin Pontiac record.

  I really wish I knew how to break a harmonica in like that one was.