by John Lurie
We stop in the middle of the street and I look at him.
“Mark, you’re freaking me out.”
“You’re freaking me out, too, John.”
I’m freaking him out? I’m amazed. I feel so disoriented; I can’t possibly have the power to freak anybody out, particularly not Mark.
“Oh, okay. Maybe we should split up.”
Then there is a very nice moment between us, unsaid.
“Okay, I’ll see you later.”
We walk in opposite directions. I go over to Larry Preston’s apartment and tell him that I’m tripping.
There’s a party going on in the building next door, do I want to go?
“I don’t think I can.”
Larry leaves me alone at his place. Next door someone is having an epileptic fit. I hear screaming.
“Get a spoon! Get a spoon!”
The police come; the red light from the top of the car is circling the walls in Larry’s apartment. I slink down onto the floor.
Larry comes back and starts to play this flutter thing on the guitar. Going down chromatically. Whatever he was playing, or whatever I thought he was playing, has influenced my own music forever. Colors were coming off of his fingers.
* * *
—
I was in the school cafeteria waiting to take my college boards. Jody Queen asked me, “John Lurie, are you really going to go to college?” This wasn’t an insult, as I was the school rebel; she was actually surprised that I would do anything so mundane. It had never occurred to me that I didn’t have to go to college. I wasn’t forced to go. So when I went into the examination, I answered a few questions and then drew a goat or a chicken over the boxes where the answers should go. Snakes were chasing pharaohs and giant penises. When the scores came back I still got 500s on the verbal and math.
After the test I walked downtown. The whole downtown area was under construction and there was a thirty-foot hill of dirt piled in a little park behind city hall. I climbed to the top, unnoticed, and sat there. I watched people rush around as they went about their business. It all seemed so futile. Empty. Gray. I wasn’t thinking about my dad, but I was feeling the loss of him. I stayed there until it got dark.
Then I got sick.
2
The First Time They Arrested Me, I Actually Was Drunk
The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I had lost all the weight that I had gained for football and gone from 180 to 135 pounds. They put me in the hospital. I was vomiting bile. That this luminous green color could exist in nature didn’t seem right. Like a color this ridiculously plastic looking had to be man-made.
A very pretty nurse came into my room and asked if I wanted a massage. I was shy, said no, and then regretted it for days and hoped she would come back.
I had a little record player in my room, so people brought me blues records. Even now, if I hear that James Cotton record, a vague, queasy recollection of that illness floods over me.
They released me from the hospital, but I wasn’t right. If I didn’t go to college, it looked as though I’d have to go to Vietnam. But that was only a small part of what was really bothering me.
I started to walk around at night. There was nothing to do in Worcester after eleven p.m. Everything closed and I would walk. I’d just walk. I’d walk around the deserted streets. I would look at my feet and walk. If I went to school, I’d stay up all night and go in the morning.
I was so lonely that I used to stand on corners at two a.m., hoping somebody would just stop their car and talk to me.
I liked the quiet of the night. I thought that I might see answers that I couldn’t find in the daytime. My mind constantly caromed with torment: Why am I here? Who will have sex with me? What does it make sense to do? Does it make sense to do anything at all? Does this life make sense? Who will have sex with me?
I was looking desperately for answers. I had read about people making breakthroughs on psychedelic drugs—Huxley and Castaneda. I thought I would try that.
I bought a hit of ecstasy. Ecstasy wasn’t the same thing as it is now. It was much more like LSD. But it doesn’t matter what ecstasy was then, because this turned out to be a horse tranquilizer.
I wasn’t doing so good. I was staying at Dean Cohen’s house. My mother and I had had another fight. I had my own little room at Dean’s house and I loved his mom.
But I was really thinking about checking out. I was talking into a tape recorder when Dean came in and found me, hunched over in terror on the floor, as I studied the hideous death flower pattern that used to be his wallpaper.
* * *
—
There were two cops who hated me. Whenever either of them saw me, they would arrest me for drunkenness, whether I was drunk or not.
In jail, in the morning, they bring you a bologna sandwich on white bread and coffee with fourteen sugars. Fourteen sugars to propel you to do more crimes as soon as you are released, so you can come back for another visit.
Once, I was in a cell by myself, and from around the corner I could hear someone yelling down the concrete corridors, “This is Craig Johnson, does anyone here know me? This is Craig Johnson!” I yelled that I was there. I thought this was kind of fun. Craig apparently did not.
Three months later, the Worcester police beat Craig Johnson to death.
* * *
—
The first time they arrested me, I actually was drunk. I was maybe sixteen and hanging out with these older guys, Larry Preston, Bill Shirley, and Willie something-or-other. They were extremely wild and a lot of them ended up in jail. My mentor was Larry Preston, who was a great guitar player. You can’t always be certain that something that impressed you as great when you were that young was actually great, but in this case I’m sure it is true.
Larry Preston’s crowd was a strange group. Some were criminals, some were artists, and some were both. Many were clearly insane.
There was Pierre, who Larry loved, but I could never, for a moment, understand why. Pierre’s claim to fame was that he had cut a hole in a large ham that was for a big family dinner. After he cut the hole, he jerked off into the ham and then put back the piece that he had cut out. His family ate the ham.
That this was something that Larry found amusing bothered me. But if you heard him play the guitar, that would vanish in a second.
Pierre was also constantly telling the story of when he was in the hospital and got an erection when the nurse came into the room. The nurse said, “I did nothing to provoke that,” and poinked his hard-on with a spoon, which, to Pierre’s amazement, made his erection immediately shrivel and die. We’d be sitting on the steps of the church near Larry’s house and Pierre would flick his wrist and say out of nowhere, “I did nothing to provoke that.” And make a little poinking sound.
We had crashed a party of these preppy high school kids. Clean boys and girls, well adjusted, on their way to fancy colleges. I had sex with a red-haired girl in the closet. She had a pony bottom, hard and round. Pony Bottom decided that this was a good opportunity to slum for a moment and cuddle up to one of the bad boys.
God knows what Bill Shirley had been doing, but when I came out of the closet, the police were there. Bill and Larry and Willie were in handcuffs. I got pointed out and we were all thrown into a paddy wagon.
Spent the night in jail. About a week later Bill Shirley and Larry Preston were arrested again. When the police opened the paddy wagon door, one of them—I can’t remember if it was Bill or Larry—punched the first cop in the face. The cops beat the shit out of them and then, by association, hated me, and I was arrested every time they saw me. That and the fact that I was one of the few guys in Worcester at that time with the audacity to have long hair, which was seen as a great threat to the established order.
At around five in the afternoon, I was talking to a frie
nd at the swing set in Duffy Field. A squad car stopped, and two cops came walking across the field, announced I was drunk, which I wasn’t, and ushered me into the squad car to spend the night in jail.
It happened a couple more times. I don’t know why I wasn’t more outraged about it. I kind of found it funny.
Bill Shirley was amazing, an unbridled force of nature. Before I had even met Bill Shirley, I had heard many stories. He went to a different junior high school and shared his homeroom with my friend Bill Noel.
Bill Shirley, who was probably thirteen at the time, came in late; the teacher said that he needed a note.
“But I’m here now.”
“You have to have a note from your mother explaining your tardiness.”
“My mother’s at work.”
“That’s not my problem.”
So Bill just stands there, with his head down. Doesn’t move and the teacher ignores him.
Finally, “Young man, I don’t know what you think you’re doing but you can’t stay here without a note.”
“My mother’s at work.”
The teacher goes back to ignoring him. Bill walks over and punches out the glass in the first window with his fist. Then moves to the second window and punches out the glass with his fist. One by one, slowly and methodically, he punched out every window along the wall. Blood and glass everywhere.
When I was seventeen, at Larry Preston’s wedding I’d smoked this pot that was so strong, I wasn’t capable of having a conversation. I’m sitting there. The party is an odd mix of the older guys I know and this other crowd of people in their thirties. Tough guys in leisure suits. A guy bets Bill Shirley that he can eat a shot glass. Bill bets him. The guy eats the glass. Does he really eat the glass? I certainly remember it like he did.
Bill scrunches up his face in bewilderment, like he’s been tricked; the lines in his forehead turn into the Thai alphabet. If it was that easy, Bill would have done it himself. A frozen moment of stares passes, and then Bill’s face scrunches up to another level of confusion and amazement. He then pulls back and punches the guy square in the face. All hell breaks loose. Everyone’s fighting. I’m so stoned it’s just a blur.
The last I heard of Bill Shirley, he had been arrested and was working on a chain gang in Florida. He had been in a McDonald’s and cut ahead of a woman in line to use the McBathroom. The woman said, indignantly, “Young man, you have a lot of nerve.”
“Yeah, and here it is,” Bill said as he whipped out his cock and waved it at her as he hopped up and down. When the police arrived, Bill was behind the counter and attempted to hold them off by hurtling a constant barrage of buns and uncooked hamburgers, as the police ducked and held on to their hats.
* * *
—
Around that same time I was at the Kitty Cat Lounge. This was the only late night hangout in Worcester; they had music there, and it was filled with people drinking and dancing, pimps, prostitutes, and musicians. Felt like a throwback to the 1950s.
I had wandered in by myself, and to my surprise found Alex there. It was a mostly black club, and Alex was a white bass player from Boston who sometimes played with the drummer Michael Avery. Alex was twenty-five or so. He was smart and different from most of the dopier blues musicians from Boston. He seemed to have a wide range of consciousness. There were a few guys like that, Michael Avery and the amazing piano player David Maxwell, who could play anything but was hiding in the dim world of blues bars.
I was asking Alex all kinds of musical questions. The thing that struck me was when I asked him who was more important, Coltrane or Hendrix.
“Coltrane.” There was a long pause and then he said, like he was discovering the answer for himself, “Coltrane, because he lived longer.”
What did that mean, because he lived longer? I didn’t really understand, but it had a certain impact. Alex went completely mad a year or two later.
When I left, it was two a.m. Across Main Street, walking slowly, was a three-hundred-pound woman I had seen earlier in the club. That I was drunk now, and that I had caught her catching a glimpse of me, gave me the courage to cross the street and start talking to her.
We went back to her place. This was not an easy deal, the layers of rolling fat created a barrier, and I could only manage an inch or so of penetration.
When I woke up hungover a couple hours later, the kitchen was full of yelling kids and one very large, angry man, who was not her husband or boyfriend, but very angry nonetheless. I slunk out of the house as quickly as I could, bumping into blurry objects on my way.
* * *
—
I decided to hitchhike across the country. My first night I arrived in Baltimore with hardly any money and nowhere to stay. I was in a deserted part of town, everything was a wreck and dismal. I saw a greasy creature that made me want to gag. My first rat.
I had a couple of White Castle hamburgers. A little white dog came out of the rat’s alley, vomited, and then keeled over and died. A couple of white guys getting out of a car saw the dog keel over and laughed.
How does one laugh at that?
There was nobody anywhere and it was only about eleven p.m. This barren landscape was Baltimore? How could there be absolutely no one? I heard a roar and went around the corner to see what was happening. A block or so away, there were hundreds of people all walking fast, all going in the same direction. Everyone was black. Insane activity, the bursting energy of a parade no longer able to contain itself.
There’d been nobody on the street and suddenly there’s a mob.
I walk toward the crowd. There’s a huge woman in a very colorful dress coming toward me. I ask, “What’s going on?”
She looks at me in amazement. “Don’t you know? The roller derby just got out!”
* * *
—
About six months before I landed in Baltimore, Larry Preston, Evan, and I had hitched down south to go to a rock festival in South Carolina. When we heard on the radio that the festival might be canceled and that Canned Heat was playing in Roanoke, Larry thought it made more sense to go to Roanoke so I could sit in on harmonica. When we got there, it turned out that I couldn’t play because Magic Dick from the J. Geils Band was already sitting in. I was jealous, particularly because Bob Hite seemed really taken with the idea that Magic Dick could play in third position, way up high, using a different key on the harmonica, which I didn’t know how to do at the time. Actually, I was never that interested, because it sounded so shrill.
And who names himself Magic Dick?
I don’t remember so much about that trip. I remember Larry laughing in amazement when he heard Henry Vestine playing in the dressing room. Larry, who is one of the best musicians I have ever met, was in the dressing room with musicians who were a huge deal at the time, and Henry Vestine was sitting in the corner, droning away on his guitar like, like…I don’t even know what to call it.
Larry was laughing really hard. “Oh! Oh, his brain is fried!”
I remember the giant star on top of a hill in Roanoke that they lit up whenever there had been a fatal car accident.
I remember when we were hitchhiking back to Worcester, we were awoken by devouring mosquitoes at dawn, when we had tried to sleep a couple of hours along the highway.
And I remember Gloria.
Backstage at the Canned Heat concert there had been this sassy Southern girl named Gloria, who was flirting with the guys in the band. Flirting isn’t quite the word.
We’d gotten her number.
* * *
—
Before I left Worcester on this trip, I called her and said I might be coming down that way. I don’t think she even remembered who I was, but Gloria was a nymphomaniac, and I guess it was slim pickings in Roanoke, so she said, “Okay, why not?” I went to Roanoke, Virginia, to see her.
I was very excit
ed about the idea of having sex with Gloria, but I was also scared to death because she seemed so sexually worldly. I was so shy at this stage, I could hardly go into a restaurant and order without being terrified, never mind the idea of dealing with a devouring vixen.
Gloria was about twenty-five and had a wonderful drawl that floated out of a sultry mouth. She had short, curly hair and a pert little bottom that she used to full effect. She waved it like a flag. She hailed cabs with it.
To my great disappointment, when I got to Gloria’s, this German guy was already there. He was a couple of years older than me, taller than me, and had an incredible physique. A little sleazy and completely amoral, but I liked him somehow.
The second day, the German guy was out somewhere, and Gloria came into my room and sat down on the edge of the bed while I lay there. We talked for a minute, and then there was a little awkward silence. She picked a pen up from the floor and started going up and down on it really fast with her hand, like she was jerking it off. I didn’t know what to do and so I did nothing.
Gloria, disgusted with my shyness, got up and left the room.
Instead of hitchhiking across the country, I let the German guy talk me into taking a Greyhound bus with him to San Diego. Said it was great, that he did it all the time. He was going to visit this guy who owned a restaurant, and we could stay there and eat for free.
Taking a bus across the country is one of the most unhealthy ventures that one can put the body through. Especially if you only eat ham sandwiches and drink bottles and bottles of apricot brandy. By the time we got there, I had boils all over my back and face, and my hair was coming out in handfuls.