by (epub)
“Sit down and listen. It’s not a joke,” I told him, trying with all my might to stay composed … at which point we all exploded again, ten times worse, practically rolling on the floor. I was laughing so hard the tears were streaming down my face.
“Lalo! Hahahaha! Hoho! Your apartment burned down!”
“Yeah … I got it. Very funny.”
He had no idea about the fire, and the more we insisted, the more he thought it was a bad joke. Of course, the way we were telling him such terrible news was not especially convincing.
All of a sudden, we heard Peter Crowley yelling downstairs, “Hey, Senders! We’re waiting for you onstage!”
We apologized to Lalo for giggling so much, swearing it was just a nervous reaction, but that his apartment really did burn down and that we were very sorry.
All he said was, “And I’m the Queen of England!”
Before beginning our first song Steve said to me, “Man, he’s really gonna be upset when he realizes we weren’t kidding.”
“I hope his girlfriend has a nice place!”
Between 1980 and 1981, The Senders played an average of four shows a week in New York and its suburbs. I’d been practicing the guitar, and soon I was good enough to write all the band’s songs on it. I also started playing harmonica, and I made quick progress by playing along to Little Walter’s records. Plus, I played the harmonica onstage every night.
Our stage show was becoming a little crazier every night. Lalo would discreetly dump a whole bag of flour on the cymbals before the show, so that the whole stage would disappear under a white cloud when Marc started playing. It never failed to create the right atmosphere. We would walk onstage carrying bags of streamers, which we’d throw to the audience so they could throw them back on us later. That always went over well. If you give your audience things to throw at you, they will gladly oblige. So don’t give them shoes or bricks. … The streamers would fly in all directions in a cloud of flour, and nobody would get hurt. Although nothing was actually choreographed, we did play one song—“Crazy Date”—during which we would lie down on the floor, and we asked everyone in the audience to do the same. Every now and then, people would give us little notes with song requests. I always loved to announce into the microphone, “Somebody has a special request, but we’re going to keep on playing anyway!!”
Playing in bars night after night without spending too much time sleeping becomes its own universe of sorts. We lived in bars, onstage at night, with the flour, the streamers, and a seriously destructive R&B set. Nothing beats the feeling of a good audience that’s right in front of you; it’s actually ten times better than any large room with a high stage that keeps you from seeing jack shit. Being a bar band is an art, and one that we tried to perfect with an unlimited passion, progressively learning what tricks would cause just the right reaction. We weren’t just there to play music; everyone in the audience had to go home soaked, messed up, worn out, or with us!
Joe Strummer came back to see us at Max’s. Well, he came back … I don’t know if it was specifically to see us or not, but we were playing that night. This time he was with Paul Simonon and his girlfriend Debbie, who I had gone out with before. It was really nice to see her again and she introduced me to Paul, who invited me over to their place on 3rd Avenue the next day. I spent the afternoon with them, smoking joints and listening to the reggae cassettes Paul was playing on his famous boom box. He was very happy to tell me about each song. Just like Joe, Paul was really cool, incredibly kind, very polite, and quite funny.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of Mick Jones, their guitar player, who I met a few days later backstage at Max’s before a Heartbreakers show. He was sitting at a table, tuning his guitar to get ready to play a song with them, when I went over to him and asked for a light. He just stared at me without saying a word. Figuring he was probably just as nice as the other two and was concentrating on tuning his guitar, I picked up the lit cigarette he had put on the edge of the table so I could use it to light mine.
He exploded. “Put it back on the table!!”
I was shocked, but politely told him I was just using it to light my cigarette and would put it back in a second. I was hoping he’d calm down, but instead, he got up in a fury and screamed, “I said put it back!!!”
Everybody was staring at us. I genuinely thought he was going to punch me. So immediately, I put his cigarette back on the edge of the table and went on my way, whispering to Johnny as I passed, “What an asshole!”
Phil, 1979
Phil, Steve, and Johnny, 1981
RUN, RUN, RUN
New York, 1981
I RAN INTO JOHNNY AT KIEV, the twenty-four-hour restaurant on 2nd Avenue where we often hung out after shows. It was four in the morning, and I’d come by to pick up a few cheese blintzes to take home, when I saw him sitting there. He was all alone and fast asleep in his food. I couldn’t see his face but I recognized him by his hair and jacket. There was a roll of twenty-dollar bills at his feet, on the floor under the table. It had to be him!
“Hey! Johnny, wake up,” I told him, shaking him by the shoulders. “You dropped your money. Good thing I saw you, or it would have gotten stolen. Are you all right?”
“Ehhh?” He slowly sat up, revealing an impressive black eye.
“Holy shit! Are you okay? Who did that to you? Johnny, your money is on the floor. Here, put it in your pocket.”
“Heeyyyy, Flipper! Thanks, I must have fallen asleep,” he said, still groggy. He started telling me that Julie’s brothers had thrown him out of his own home. There had been a fight. He hit her, they hit him, everybody hit each other, but he couldn’t remember in what order. He didn’t know where to go. So I took him home with my cheese blintzes.
“Let’s take a cab,” he said. “We’ll do a quick stop on Avenue D, all right? I’ll give you some.”
“Grand and Pitt,” I told the driver. “But we have to stop on 3rd Street and Avenue D for a second to … return some keys.”
When we got to Avenue D, we told the driver to stop at the corner, but he kept going, stopping instead in front of the abandoned building where Johnny was going to buy his dope. The security at the heroin dealer’s building didn’t want cars stopping in front of their place, and immediately a little Puerto Rican guy came up to the cab, waving a baseball bat.
“Move,” he told the driver. “To the corner. There’s a lot of cops tonight.”
“Go fuck yourself, I stop where I want to. Who the fuck does this guy think he is?”
The guy slammed his baseball bat into the cab’s hood. BAM!
“Move! Or I’ll smash your windshield!”
“Move, come on, he’s gonna kill us!!” we yelled from the backseat.
The cabbie finally took off, shocked, and then he didn’t want to stop.
“Stop! Stop!” Johnny shouted. “Here! Hey, that’s good, fucking pull over already!” Johnny jumped out. “I’ll be right back, Flip.”
“What’s he doing?” the driver asked after a little while. “Look at my hood! Nothing but fucking crazies in this town, goddamn riffraff, no respect for nothing. They’re lower than animals, you know? Human garbage, druggies, pimps. I got a gun. Do you know what I’m gonna do to this bunch of roaches, one day?”
I was starting to wonder if this guy was a friend of Robert DeNiro, when Johnny came back around the corner, hopping instead of walking, because he’d broken one of his boot heels during the fight with Julie’s brothers. He tried to run too fast and stumbled, falling flat on his face on the sidewalk. A police car was slowly coming up the block, and it passed right by our cab while Johnny was on all fours trying to gather his bags of dope. By the time we got to my place, my blintzes were cold.
Johnny slept on the sofa for three days straight, only getting up to shoot up again. We only knew he wasn’t dead because he snored like an elephant, and from time to time, we had to turn down the s
tereo to make sure he was still alive.
“Yeah, it’s okay, I hear him,” Risé would say.
He finally woke up and went to play at Max’s. We went to see Mink DeVille at CBGB.
In November, Bruce decided to throw me a birthday party at his place. He invited the whole gang, as well as some others. Late that afternoon, I went to help him set up the apartment, and he greeted me with, “Lipper-LuLu! I just got back from the bakery. I got you a chocolate cake, but I left the candles on the counter and need to go back. Come with me and I’ll let you pick out some other stuff to decorate your cake.”
I agreed, promising to act surprised when I saw the cake at the party later.
At the bakery, I chose a few plastic planes and several Indians, essential for any good aviation- and Wild West-themed birthday cake. A cake good enough for Howard Hughes, you could say. As we were stepping out of the bakery, I just made it past the door when I heard a little click right by my ear. I turned around to see that there was a gun pointed right at my head!
“Police! Freeze!” yelled a second guy who was also aiming a gun at us; this one was behind a parked car. There was a third one, too, on the left, pointing his gun directly at Bruce. They were all in plain clothes. They jumped on us and threw us onto the hood of the car. One of the cops ripped the little white paper bag from my hand and demanded, victoriously, “What’s in here, mister?”
“Umm … four plastic planes, and uh … three Indians … and some candles …” I told him.
Though he seemed to realize I wasn’t kidding, he started to search me anyway. One of the others shouted into his walkie-talkie, “We got ’em! They were on 2nd Avenue.” The third guy was getting very aggressive, asking us over and over, “Where is the gun?!” They handcuffed us, threw us in the back of one of their cars, and quickly drove us a few blocks away, where they stopped in front of a deli where two other police cars were already parked. Some guy, probably the cashier, came up to the car, looked in at us for a while, then turned to the cops and said, “No, it’s definitely not them!”
“Shit man, good thing he wasn’t blind!”
“… or had Alzheimer’s!” Bruce added, and we both started to laugh, discreetly.
They gave me back my planes and my Indians, and made a sort of apology. They explained that two guys matching our descriptions had just robbed a few stores in the area. The cops took off as suddenly as they’d appeared, still on the search for the right guys. We were a bit shaken, but nevertheless we went back home to decorate the cake.
The first guests arrived around 9 p.m., but the vibe wasn’t very good. In fact, it was downright depressing. The guy Bruce had sent to Norfolk Street to get dope hadn’t come back yet, and he’d been gone long enough that we were getting suspicious. There were about twenty people in the living room and four on the stoop outside, all nervously looking trying to get a glimpse of him coming back. Bruce was getting freaked out, and he was doing everything he could to keep things gloomy, going so far as to stop the music so that no one could dance, and yelling at the guests for being badly dressed assholes! A few people were starting to put their coats back on, even as others kept coming in, en masse. The whole New York underground was there: Max’s posers, the “in” crowd, the has-beens and the wouldbes, the beautiful, the pathetic … but still no dealer. Have you ever been to a party where junkies are waiting for their dope? It’s a little like a funeral, but way less funny and way more uptight! Bruce was just about to kick everybody out when suddenly, there he was! They could see him far in the distance. He was quickly getting closer, they could see him fully now, and he was grinning. Hallelujah!
Bruce put on James Brown’s “Sex Machine” full blast and a few champagne bottles were popped, as we all ran toward Bruce’s room to do the dope that had finally arrived.
“Really good, isn’t it?” Bruce said, slowly closing his eyes and leaning forward.
He promptly collapsed on the floor.
“Fuck! He shot up three bags!” Cookie exclaimed, looking up at me and David.
“Is he out of his mind?”
“Hey, Bruce, are you all right?” I shook him, but he wouldn’t wake up. Shit! He’d OD’d.
“Help me get him up. Let’s try to make him walk,” I told the others. We dragged him back and forth as best we could, but to no avail. We laid him down on his bed and slapped him around a bit, but still nothing. Cookie put her hand on his chest, and I grabbed his wrist. We looked at each other in terror: there was no pulse. His heart had stopped. He was dead.
“Let’s throw him in cold water—it might work,” Cookie suggested. We carried him to the bathroom, pushing our way through the crowd of degenerates that had already filled up the apartment. Someone was in the bathroom but the door was unlocked. “Hey! I’m trying to piss!” he protested, as we threw him out of there. I locked the door while David and Cookie put Bruce in the bathtub and turned the cold water on full blast. The bathtub was slowly filling up, but Bruce still wasn’t moving. We kept shaking him and slapping him, but it wasn’t working. Meanwhile, a line for the bathroom was forming outside, and a few guys started banging on the door yelling things like, “Hey, ho! Come on, lovebirds, hurry up! Go rent a hotel room, goddammit!” and “Open the door, assholes, or I’m gonna piss on it!”
We looked at each other, none of us knowing what to do. The water kept rising and Bruce was still lying there, dead.
“Hey! Open the door, hurry up!”
“Sorry, this might take awhile. Go pee on a tree!” I yelled back through the door.
“But I have to shit!”
“It isn’t cold enough—go get ice cubes!” Cookie said to me; she’d gone white, while Bruce was turning purple. “Hurry up!”
I ran out of the bathroom and found myself face to face with two very large and very drunk drag queens, who didn’t look happy. “Ah! Finally, Romeo!” one said, while the other, glimpsing David and Cookie, started screaming, “My god! How many of them are in there?! It’s an orgy!!” There were at least ten people waiting for the bathroom, and they all jumped on me.
“Hey, man, it’s not your bathroom!” some little pimply punk said. I told him to fuck off.
“Shut up! Move!” I screamed, as I shoved him back with my arm, pushing my way through to the kitchen. “Happy birthday,” another offered shyly. Same scene in front of the fridge, where I had stuck two large bags of ice cubes for the party. There was only a quarter of a bag left, and most of it was half-melted anyway. On my way back to the bathroom, moving as fast as I could, I actually started grabbing ice cubes from people’s cups. I got stuck at the back of the line, where some jerk in a Hawaiian shirt told me, “Don’t jump the line! We’re all waiting here!” I went right through him, arms filled with ice cubes, also shoving aside the two drag queens and that same little pimply punk.
“Move! Move! Cookie, open the door, it’s me!”
I slipped in the bathroom, while the people outside hurled insults at me, and threw all the ice cubes I had gathered into the bathtub, which was now full and where Bruce was still lying, dead. Cookie locked the door behind me, and I heard someone say, “He went to get rubbers?”
“No, ice cubes. His girlfriend’s ass is on fire!”
The three of us were on our knees in front of the tub, paralyzed with fear, not knowing what to try next.
“Quick, we’ve got to do something! Coke! Who’s got coke? Let’s shoot him up with coke to give him a shock,” I decided, running back out of the bathroom, shoving everyone aside again. I tried to locate Mike, a friend who had offered me cocaine maybe ten minutes earlier. I ran into the packed living room, where someone had just put on Devo’s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! It was extremely loud and everyone was dancing in the dark. I switched the light on. People started yelling, but right away I spotted Mike and dashed over to him. “Mike, do you have any coke left?!” I demanded, desperately trying to scream over the music.
�
�Hey, Phil, great party!” he screamed back, continuing to dance like a fool. “Didn’t you just tell me you don’t like coke?”
“Yeah, gimme everything you’ve got! Hurry up! I’ll buy it for twice the price—I’ll give you anything you want!”
“Look, I’m a robot!” he said, as he took from his pocket a little plastic bag, which I instantly ripped from his hand.
“I’ll explain later. Thank you!”
“Happy birthday. Leave me a little bit, okay?” I heard him yell, as I ran back toward Bruce’s room to get a needle and a spoon. Rushing to the bathroom again, I heard one of the people in line laugh, “Look out! He’s coming back!” They knew me by now, and they all cleared off. Once in the bathroom, I put all of Mike’s coke in the spoon, mixed it with a little water, sucked it up into the syringe and stuck it directly into Bruce’s arm.
Nothing. Still nothing. I pulled the needle from his arm and sat on the floor in a puddle of water.
“Hey, Romeo, open the door! It ain’t funny anymore. I’m gonna pee my panties,” yelled one of the drag queens.
“Me too!” came a chorus of about fifteen others.
“Salt!” said Cookie. “Water and salt! We should shoot him up with salt—let’s try it. I read somewhere that it can work. Go get some salt! Hurry!”
I took off again as fast as I could toward the kitchen, cheered along by more insults, with most of the guests hiding their cups as they saw me. I ran right into Mike, who said, “Hey! You’re running all around like a monkey. Did you snort the whole thing or what?!” I didn’t bother to answer him as I ran and pushed everyone away from the bathroom door for a third time. I nearly got lynched as I banged on the door.
“Cookie, open up, it’s me!” I screamed again. She mixed a little salt and water in the spoon and stuck the syringe right back into Bruce’s vein. Nothing at all. I heard one of them yell from behind the door, “Cookie, open up, it’s me!”