by John Lurie
* * *
—
I dropped a passenger in Roxbury. There was a basketball court, all lit up with a serious game going on, and the bleachers were fairly packed with people watching. I parked the cab and watched for a while.
All the players were black. Everyone in the stands was black. I didn’t think much of it.
I had played in the black game in Worcester and it was fine. It was better than fine, it was pretty much the most fun I had ever had. And I could hold my own.
I was completely unaware of the racial tensions in Boston.
There were some really good players, but I assessed it and thought that I was as good as the players on the low end out there.
So when the game ends, I go out onto the court, start shooting around with the players who’re going to play next, and get into the game. One guy with a beard nods at me as we shoot around, and I think maybe it’s okay.
But I’m not welcome. The vibe is heavy. And what makes it worse is when the game starts, the ball deflects off someone’s hand right to me, and I put up a fairly easy ten-foot jump shot and, swish, it goes in.
I hit the first basket of the game and seem to have crossed all kinds of lines here.
Someone on my team shoots and I go underneath to get the rebound, and BLAM! this guy elbows me hard in the eye. I think probably on purpose. I can hear people in the crowd gasp as the thwack to my eye echoes through the outside court. My eye is fucked up. One of the older, kinder players comes over to see if I’m okay.
I can’t open my eye. This kinder guy helps me off the court.
I take the cab back. I’m doing a lot of yoga and the book says that a headstand cures everything. So I decide to do that; this will bring blood to the afflicted area. When I come down there’s a lot of pressure on my eye and I reach up to touch it. I look at my hand and there’s blood. A lot of blood. In the bathroom mirror, I see that my eye is swollen up to the size of a racquetball and blood is gushing out of my closed eyelid.
Michael Avery takes me to the hospital, where they get the swelling down and then give me drops for my eye. The drops will mess with my depth perception, so I’m not supposed to drive. The next day I’m sitting outside of the building on Harvard Avenue and this kid is coming down the street on a bike. A car is coming the other way. They can’t see each other! I scream, “Look out!” The kid and car pass each other a full ten feet apart, both of them staring at me in bewilderment.
I liked driving a cab but it was very time consuming. To make any money I had to drive fourteen hours a day, I was always getting lost, and didn’t have time to practice the horn.
I get a brilliant idea: There must be a program for people who are insane but not so insane that they have to be institutionalized. I do some research and find out that there is. I can get $250 a month if I qualify.
I find a young social worker who shows a deep concern for my case. I refuse to ever look her in the eyes. I stare at the floor. I talk from the back of my throat. She asks lots of questions.
“Do you hear people calling your name?”
“Right now?”
“No, maybe when you’re out on the street, do you hear people call your name who aren’t there?”
In actual fact, I did. “Yes.”
She asks more questions and I don’t really answer, I just kind of murmur at her. Then I take a deep breath and rock my head back and forth.
“It’s good.”
“What’s good, John?”
“I can’t, I can’t really.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Am I okay?”
“Yes, John, you might be schizophrenic.”
I try to discern how she wants me to answer different questions, throwing in an occasional moan or bark. I have to see her twice more, but it works. She’s going to recommend me for Supplemental Security Income.
It takes about two months, but after I go to this government office, I will start getting checks. I go down to the agency that handles this deal. They make you wait forever. I’m a little worried that my symptoms will change because I don’t remember exactly what I did the first time.
I’m tired of waiting in this place. It’s a big, hot room with all the charms of governmental bureaucracy. A guy comes in with a filthy shirt, torn jeans, and a very hostile look on his face. He comes in and walks to the middle of the room and gets down on one knee, pointing his finger above his head toward the heavens.
“I WANT THE MONEY! I WANT THE MONEY!”
He gets immediate attention, bureaucrats scurrying everywhere, telling him he has to go to this line and then that line.
“I WANT THE MONEY!”
Okay, no lines.
This guy’s a genius. My act is nowhere near as good as his. He’s getting immediate attention.
“I WANT THE MONEY! I WANT THE MONEY!”
I was very impressed. A little jealous, to tell you the truth.
* * *
—
So I started getting the checks. I felt a little guilty about it. Maybe this wasn’t so moral. I should work. Why should I get this money?
I went to see this evil psychic I’d seen before. He was a suspicious character but very accurate. He said that I was an artist and that they were the enemy, and I should definitely take the money. So I did.
But you know what? If this society had really taken a look at me at that time, they would have decided certainly that I was not one of them.
I met a girl named Andrea. We were both insecure and depressed and it was a dismal thing of a relationship. She was studying dance and not doing so well with it. She would have sparks of wonderful life to her and then just get so lost she would bump into walls.
I started playing music for the dance classes at Radcliffe College, where my sister taught. I had a tambourine under my foot and would play the sax to “step-brush-land, step-brush-land.”
Andrea and I moved into a place together in Allston, right on the Mass Pike. It was not really a neighborhood, just a few old three-story tenements sitting off desolately by themselves. A solid wind would have crumbled the building to the ground.
The landlord was an alcoholic, with a big head and white hair that was so healthy and perfect, it seemed to belong to a politician. He lived on the first floor and never left. The building was in complete disrepair, and for some spooky reason, we were always finding dead crows scattered about the barren yard.
There was a woman, with not many teeth, constantly around the house. She was really out there. Usually she was drunk, but she was so insane that it was hard to know if she was drunk or not. I came into the house from the cold one day and she was standing on the landing.
“They put their fingers in my cunt! They put their fingers in my cunt!”
She was spitting as she wailed and wiggling her fingers around up in the air.
* * *
—
On one of my many trips to New York, I had somehow started smoking. I was twenty-four now. Matia was in Robert Wilson’s The $ Value of Man, which I saw, and it hit me really deeply as something important and different and completely modern.
Andrea and I were always depressed. I was a weirdo, at least for Boston, and she was a not-very-talented dancer. We had no confidence alone, and together we were worse. The low point came when I was with her in Coolidge Corner. She was wearing some fabric thing that she had wrapped around her as a skirt. The trolley came and as she ran across the street to catch it, the fabric thing opened up, revealing her undancerly, plump bottom with no underwear.
These two ten-year-old kids were standing next to me on the corner and one said, “Look at that lady.”
At least thirty people saw her ass as she hopped onto the train. I yelled but she couldn’t hear me. Then I just walked away. It was too sad, somehow.
Evan was in London n
ow. He was living in a squat and made it sound very glamorous, so I decided to go. A couple days before I was planning to leave, Andrea came home late at night, escorted by her brother. She was crying hysterically. The look on her younger brother’s face made me think that this had been going on for hours. She was already on the verge of a breakdown but had had sex with a lesbian friend of hers, and it had put her over the edge.
I thought I would only be gone for a month or so. I left my record collection, my good tape recorder, and most of my stuff at that apartment, on Lincoln Street, with her. Of course, when I came back to get them, it was a year later, she was gone, and no one had any idea where she was.
6
Dancing Hitler
I’ve got mashed potatoes smeared all over my face. The British couple are staring at me in horror.
I left Boston and went to New York on my way to England. Spent three or four days on a mad binge, saying hello and goodbye to everyone. I didn’t sleep.
Rick Morrison gave me a Quaalude, a real one. I’d never had one before; he said to take it twenty minutes before I got on the plane. I was anxious to take it and swallowed it down at the water cooler in the terminal, an hour before the flight.
Twenty minutes later I was incredibly horny. I called Rick on the phone and said, “What is this pill? I have to sleep with somebody. Right now! Who am I going to sleep with in the airport?”
Rick, with a leer in his voice, said, “Anybody.”
I got on the plane. I had the window seat and was trapped in by a lovely British couple in their midfifties who’d just had their first vacation in years. They offered me a cigarette after the plane took off and we were talking. They’d had a wonderful time. “It’s our first visit to the States. We’ve seen the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.”
I must have been pulling it off that I wasn’t completely droolingly trashed, because they were going on and on. They were really very sweet.
The stewardess brought a drink and then the meal. It must have been the drink that did it. When I wake up, my head is on the pull out tray thing and my meal is gone. I sit up and don’t realize that I’ve got mashed potatoes all over the right side of my face. My head must have just gone plonk on the tray.
The squat Evan is staying at is horrible. No heat. Everything dirty. A bunch of lunatics, with bad teeth, trying to run a household; they would have meetings to discuss the orders of business and it was just nuts. Once, a government official came by to challenge their right to stay in the abandoned building. He knocked on the door and got no answer. He went around to the window and saw a bunch of scraggly people, sitting around. He knocked on the window and yelled, but nobody looked up. He went back to the door and buzzed. He went to another window: more people with tattered clothes sitting around in chairs who didn’t look up when he pounded on the glass. He came back the next day and was greeted, congenially, at the door.
“Why didn’t you let me in last night?”
“Were you here last night?”
“Yes! I was pounding on the window and nobody looked up. Is that some kind of joke to you people?”
“We didn’t hear you.”
The amazing thing was that they really hadn’t heard him. They were all high on this or that and just sat there in their lunkhead stupor not hearing him for real.
I was pissed at Evan. This wasn’t glamorous, like at all. This was kind of disgusting. Ev himself seemed to be doing quite well, though. He had cut his waist-length hair and wasn’t wearing jeans anymore. He had a short army haircut and had changed his fashion to look sort of like an out-of-work college professor, tweed sport coats with elbow patches and hard brown shoes. There was something more solid and positive in his walk.
Somewhere around this time, he had confided in me that he was gay. I know that he actually told me when we were walking around in New York, but it was certainly around this time. I know that he told me in New York because I know the exact spot where he told me. Lafayette Street between Bleecker and Bond. It’s that same thing of a frame in my memory that goes click and something from that moment holds it.
He was clearly nervous to tell me. But it was bizarre how little impact it had, though I was very surprised. It hadn’t occurred to me.
I think I just said, “Really? Okay.”
And it was okay, perfectly okay, and Evan could see I meant it and we just went about our evening.
When he told my mom, she said, “Oh, I always thought it would be John.” I don’t know what provoked that. Actually, I do know. She wanted to piss me off, which she did for a minute, but then I just had to laugh. “I’m not gay. Evan can be gay and that is fine, but I am not gay and you know it. You just said that to make me angry, which I’m not.”
There was a girl in London named Wendy, who I guess had spent some time with Evan and was still into him. Wendy was the sexiest thing I had ever seen. I asked Evan if he minded if I got together with Wendy and he said, “I’d rather you wouldn’t.”
I tried to wouldn’t, but it was not possible. I was smitten. And, Evan: I really am sorry about it to this day. But only a little.
Wendy lived in a one-room council flat. These are provided by the government. She didn’t have a phone—no one had a phone. If you wanted to play with Roger Turner, the drummer in Portobello, and Mike Block, the piano player from Sandringham Road, it could take a week of traveling on the tube to set it up. Wendy’s place was right behind the London Coliseum in Covent Garden.
At night, I would be outside talking to sweet little eighty-four-year-old Ben, and Rudolf Nureyev would come walking out of the stage entrance of the Coliseum. Just me, Ben, and Rudolf Nureyev in the brisk London air. Ben loved World War II, he loved to talk about how awful and hard it was, but if it weren’t for the war, I don’t think that Ben would have had much to say.
The whole floor shared a communal bathroom, which was very cold but clean. You would stand there freezing putting five pence into the water heater to get enough water for a third of a bath.
I started playing on the street—busking, they call it. I played in Piccadilly Circus, on weekends, or near the Tottenham Court tube station at around five p.m. as people were rushing home from work. People would throw money in my case, sometimes quite a lot. I tried it in New York, down near Wall Street, a couple years later when I was broke. I didn’t get a penny. What was so bizarre was how the stockbrokers would avert their gaze, embarrassed that you were there. I finally started to just scream into the air, standing behind my alto case, to make them as uncomfortable as possible.
London was different, and it was accepted—there were lots of buskers there. Many of the guys had their territory marked out and it was understood that you couldn’t take their spot. There were two or three different one-man bands, guys who wore a bass drum on their back, hunched over, and played the guitar, with a harmonica in a holder and maybe cymbals clanging between their knees. There was a spindly old guy Wendy called Hitler, who dressed up in a tuxedo and top hat and danced about in a way that seemed he would soon either catch his ride on a spaceship or burst into flames. There was the Budgie Man, who had a bunch of trained white pigeons that would do not very interesting tricks.
One night, I was playing in Piccadilly Circus and this somewhat official looking guy, in a uniform, came by to warn me, very politely, that all the buskers were getting arrested. He almost was apologizing for it. The police never bothered you, so I ignored him, but twenty minutes later I was arrested.
The police are so civil in London, exceedingly polite. They processed me through and put me in a cell for the night filled with other street musicians. Dancing Hitler wasn’t there, and they didn’t arrest the Budgie Man because they probably didn’t want to deal with his birds. Other than that there were five or six of us in this kind of holding area with bunks. One of the one-man bands that I saw all the time was there, cursing and cursing. These
guys were so mean. I thought that there would be a certain camaraderie because we were all street musicians captured together, but these people were just ugly. I had encountered weirdness from British musicians toward musicians from the United States, a jealousy thing, so I stayed back and didn’t say anything. Thought they might not appreciate the Yank on their turf, but they were not speaking to each other either. There wasn’t a sound from anyone, all night, except for the one-man-band guy I recognized, just going, “Fuck! Fuck! Shit! Fuck!”
London, at least then, was the most violent place I have ever seen. Not guns, just sheer out-and-out brutal shit. There were always fist fights in Piccadilly Circus like I never saw in New York. Groups of guys fighting each other, fans of different soccer teams. Two wrong looks and it would just start. I was walking home late one night and walked past an alley where I could hear this girl’s shrill, ugly voice, screaming, “Hit him again.” There were three guys standing around a car, and as I looked to see, this guy’s head was hanging out the open car door, facing upward. He looked like he was only partly conscious; there was a guy kneeling on his chest, just punching him in the face every time the horrible girl demanded it.
I was playing in Piccadilly Circus on a weekend night. Very crowded. I was playing with my eyes closed, when—blam!—out of nowhere some football yobbo punched me full in the face. I didn’t even know what had happened for a moment. I just looked up from the ground to see a bunch of drunken assholes walking away, laughing. They weren’t even looking back.
Destroy something every ten yards and move on.
I figured out a great trick for weekends. When the idiot drunken football fans would start coming in, I’d get them to sing their team song. They’re standing there drunk and singing and I just put my saxophone case, open, in front of them, so that other fans of that team would come by and jokingly throw money into the case. I made a fortune like that. Then when the fans of another team came by, a fight would start, and I’d pack up my case filled with money and scurry with my saxophone in one hand and my case in the other to the next corner.