The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  The first few went fine. I was a little nervous, but not too bad. The fifth bank, I signed the check and it didn’t look remotely like Eric’s signature. I was told that I would have to see the bank manager. He asked me to sign it again, but because now I had to do it quickly, it looked even worse. He asked me to sign again and it was looking less and less correct. I announced that I was very nervous because I was going to Europe in a couple of hours and I had never flown before. The manager smiled at me and said, “I understand, that’s fine,” and gave me $500 in cash.

  After I finished, Eric reported the checks stolen and collected a thousand dollars.

  With my $500, I was supposed to make an astronaut movie, Men in Orbit. But I ran into a little problem. I had just gotten through a course of antibiotics and it was the first night I could drink in ten days. Not drinking for ten days was very austere for me at that time and as soon as I could, I got drunk.

  Stumbling home, I ran into Ann Campbell and her white friend.

  “Hi, John. Want to take two girls home?”

  Ann Campbell was a prostitute who had once tried to shoot me through my bathroom door with a tiny pistol she carried, because she was jonesing for coke and I wouldn’t pay to have sex with her. But that was all forgotten now.

  So I had $500 and thought I would spend some of it on these two women. When we got to my place, I went into the back room, took some money out for them, and hid the rest in the vest pocket of my coat. Ann asked what I wanted. What I wanted was for one of them to blow me while the other licked my balls, but they were older and I was too shy to ask. Ended up me and the white girl on the living room floor with her on top.

  On the way out, Ann looked at me in a way that made me sense something. I went back to check and the money was gone. I threw on my clothes and ran out to Second Avenue, but they were nowhere to be found. Then I remembered that she had given me her address once, over a year ago, and ran upstairs to find it.

  * * *

  —

  She lived on the corner of Avenue B and Fourth Street. Back then, Avenue B was like a war zone. Could be really dangerous, especially at night. I got to her apartment and knocked on the door. A sleepy giant answered. He didn’t know where she was. He held his head in a way that indicated both that he wanted to go back to sleep and that I was clearly out of my mind to be knocking on doors on Avenue B at two in the morning.

  I start walking around the neighborhood and see two plainclothes policemen sitting in a car.

  I ask if they are cops.

  They seem shocked by the question and start stammering.

  First they say no, they aren’t cops.

  But I go, “Come on, you guys.”

  They ask, “How did you know we were cops?”

  And I am thinking, Are you kidding? The hair. The shirts. The car. The feigned nonchalance sitting out here at two in the morning.

  But I don’t say any of that. I just tell them what happened.

  They drive me around for a bit and when we don’t find her, they drive me home.

  So on the day I stole $500, it was now stolen from me. Makes sense.

  But a month or so later, I get a call saying my court case against Ann Campbell is tomorrow morning at nine. I have to get somewhere by nine a.m.?

  I didn’t know I had a court case.

  In this enormous room, I see Ann go by with two policemen holding her by the arms. Some courtroom person tells me to wait on this bench.

  Ten minutes later, he comes out and tells me it is all settled. She has to pay me back my $500 or she will get an eight-month sentence.

  I say, “Wait a minute. How is that right? I didn’t speak to a judge or a lawyer or anything and you are just taking my word on this?”

  “Sir, are you saying that what you told the officers is untrue?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then I see no problem.”

  The unfairness and horror of the whole system hit me, but the last thing I needed to do was stand there and argue with this little court person who just wanted to get me out of there and go on to the next pile of shit he was going to deal with.

  So I let it go. I let the whole thing go. I had stolen the money anyway. This all made sense.

  In the end, my uncle Jerry bailed me out and lent me the money to make the film.

  * * *

  —

  Originally, what I wanted to do was an astronaut training program movie, a set of exercises that I had made up, with autistic barking, done by a bunch of us young men, with short haircuts.

  Eric, Arto Lindsay, James Nares, Seth Tillett, and I would jam. These guys were all very talented but knew nothing about music. We would take turns on guitar, bass, drums, the saxophone, and shouting into the microphone. The result was unbelievable and it was better than any music I had ever done with normal musicians. I wanted to capture the dynamic of that rigid fervor in the film. Like Robert Wilson in ferocious military training.

  We would do these sort of tai chi movements that I had invented and then spout out a series of syllables in unison. Take a step or make a movement and spout another group of syllables. Then freeze.

  But Eric thought the idea of the astronaut training film was about as bad as any he had ever heard in his life. So it turned out to be a simulated documentary of an Apollo spaceflight, filmed in my apartment. Mission control was built over the tub in my kitchen, with all kinds of electrical stuff I had foraged from the street. People sat in white coats over control panels that looked legitimate, except that you could see a bit of my bathtub in the corner of the shot.

  The capsule was built in my living room. A piece of cardboard, painted gray, standing upright, was the outside of the capsule. I found a car seat that I spray-painted silver and used a bunch of junk and semiworking electrical stuff for our control panel. The cardboard was about three feet off the ground, with James Nares, who was a genius, bending down into the set and moving his arm around like a snake. With the camera constantly moving above and around our heads, we were actually able to simulate a feeling of weightlessness.

  I did have an outline for the film, but it was abandoned immediately. In place of writing a script or bothering to actually act, we would just take LSD instead and see what happened.

  We shot the opening of the movie while visiting Steve Kramer in the hospital. Kramer had a party trick. He would walk on the ledge of rooftops, drunk, and never fall off. Vito Acconci was out of town and someone threw a party at his loft. Everyone was up on the roof and Kramer was doing his party trick, while his wife, Patti Astor, screamed at him to get down. Her voice sounded like she had swallowed an angry cat. “Steven! Get down! Steven!”

  This had the feeling of something that happened all the time. Kramer did his party trick and Patti yelled at him.

  When we left the party, Kramer was still walking on the ledge. No one gave it a second thought.

  We got back to Eric’s and the phone rang. It was Patti Astor on the phone. I could tell by the screaming. Eric hung up and said we had to go to Bellevue Hospital.

  We arrived in the lobby of Bellevue to see Kramer being whisked through on a gurney. You could see the bone from his leg jutting through the skin and his lower teeth coming through his upper lip. It is funny how your mind works at twenty-five: You see Kramer being wheeled through looking like some kind of bloody frog monster and you don’t think, This is horrible. You look at it and think, Wow, how unusual.

  * * *

  —

  We went back to see him a few days later. James came with a Super 8 camera and Eric and I were dressed as astronauts in jumpsuits. Kramer was trying to pull the IVs out of his arm and Patti was screaming, again. Patti really loved him and Kramer was impossible.

  On the way out, James sat facing backward in a shopping cart that we had brought to use as a dolly. Rick Morrison pulled him as fast as he
could, while James filmed Eric and me marching, invincibly, down the long hospital corridor. We stuck out our chests, nobly, and waved at the nurses and attendants as they screamed at us to get out. That was the opening sequence to Men in Orbit.

  That night we shot a little bit of stuff in my kitchen for mission control. Next day, I had to get our costumes together, buy the LSD, borrow two motorcycle helmets, and finish the set so we could shoot the movie that night.

  I was running around like mad. Jeffrey Cantor lent me his very expensive motorcycle helmets. I bought two Mylar suits for $9 each at a store on Bowery. Then I popped some LSD.

  Everybody was there in my apartment: Michael McClard, the voice of mission control; Becky Johnston; and James, who stood above us gyrating the camera as we tilted way back in the silver car seat.

  All the rushing around and the LSD was making me feel a little odd. We shot one three-minute reel of film, but Eric was goofing around too much. He kept blaring disco music from the broken boom box behind his head.

  This was not what I had in mind but I cannot control him. I want to say something to Eric to try to get the thing back on track but feel the words Cut it out getting buried in my throat, like the sound cannot enter the room.

  I feel very strange. I am too high.

  I stand up and get out of the capsule. I try to tie my shoes but can’t figure out how to do it. Becky has to come and do it for me. I am catatonic, and Eric is laughing his head off and blaring music.

  I cannot talk. Eric is getting mad, because we’ve done all this work, this is the big night, and I am an LSD vegetable. He jumps up from the capsule and kicks a boot-size hole into my apartment wall.

  “I am really mad at you! I am really mad at you!”

  I stand up again and look at everyone’s faces. This film, what is it? Is it good for the world? Maybe it’s evil, and who are these people in my apartment? Can I trust them?

  But the question I keep asking myself is, is this film good for the world?

  Somehow, I wind up on the roof of the building in my space suit. I don’t know how much time has gone by before Michael McClard appears out of the darkness in his white lab coat. He gives me a handful of Valium and I am ready to go in no time.

  Eric and I get back in the capsule. I ask him if he has a light.

  “Not since John Glenn died.”

  We find this hilarious. An enormous leap from: “Do you have a match?” “Not since Superman died.” But we liked the joke very much.

  Michael thought it might be more comfortable for us if he set up the mixing board in the capsule and gave us two sets of headphones. This way we could hear and control the sound ourselves. There was feedback everywhere. If they had given the mixing board to monkeys it would have sounded about the same.

  As mission control, Michael talked us through the trip.

  “All right, gentlemen, you are now in orbit. Why don’t you relax and enjoy the flight?”

  We leaned back in our seats for about two seconds and then simultaneously realized that a movie of two astronauts relaxing was not very entertaining and started to laugh.

  There were a bunch of McDonald’s hamburgers and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches taped to the wall of the capsule since early that afternoon.

  Michael said, “Perhaps you should have something to eat.” We started to giggle; the idea of food was ridiculous. The idea that anyone had ever eaten food was ridiculous.

  Eric groped behind his head and pulled a hamburger off the wall.

  “Mission control, mission control, the food that you have prepared for us seems to have come out of the container cold.”

  Eric’s laugh had become a high-pitched gurgling that sounded like he might be drowning.

  “They are really, really good, mission control. Bob is having a Filet-O-Fish and I am having a hamburger. They are really, really good.”

  Mission control responds, “They look really good and we think we’ll send out for a bunch of them ourselves.”

  I couldn’t eat my Filet-O-Fish. It just sat there in my mouth; I had no idea how to swallow. Eric was talking into a ketchup package, thinking it was the microphone. We could not stop laughing. Anything either of us said, even just one word of a phrase, was met with sheets of laughter from the other. This was then amplified ten times and distorted through the mixing board run by monkeys.

  We called Evan, who also lived on Third Street. It was late and he was asleep but I told him to come right over. I asked him to stand outside the capsule and play little beeps on the harmonica, which he did gladly.

  There was so much electrical noise from the lights and equipment and broken stereos that were part of the capsule that when we finally stopped to take a break and shut everything down, there was a whoosh, a big contained cloud of whoosh, that you could see as it floated out the window and bounced around the East Village night.

  * * *

  —

  We stopped shooting when we ran out of film. It was light out and we went for breakfast.

  We were all sitting in Veselka on Second Avenue. Eric and I were still tripping and laughing. James started to cry. I wasn’t sure why, but it somehow made sense.

  I went over and hugged him.

  After that we went for a walk over to the West Side. There were cherry blossoms. I love the second half of tripping when the crunch goes away and you start seeing things you have forgotten, and there are cherry blossoms.

  We were so sure of ourselves, we never doubted anything. We were powerful, smart, energetic, confident, egocentric, and astoundingly naïve. Nothing outside of our fourteen block radius mattered. From Houston to Fourteenth Street, from the Bowery to Avenue A, that was the only universe.

  9

  The John Lurie School of Bohemian Living

  I had disappeared into hermit mode to edit Men in Orbit when I met Leisa Stroud. Nobody remotely like her had ever been interested in me before. She was only twenty but years more worldly and sophisticated than I was ever going to be.

  Editing Super 8 film is horrible. At least for someone like me who is not neat. The film is tiny, about a third of an inch wide, and you have to pick your frame, splice it, and then glue the little pieces together. Glue gets everywhere: on your shirt, on the middle of the frame, in your eyelashes, on your sandwich.

  You have to view the footage through this little viewer thing that you crank by hand, which makes a loud, unpleasant, metallic wobbling sound as you turn it. Then you cut the bits out that you want and keep it all organized. It is a nightmare. It was taking forever to weed through all the footage and make a story out of it.

  One night, Michael McClard and James Nares and some others were going for a drink and yelled up to my window for me to come down and go out with them.

  Leisa was there. This was the first time I’d met her. I had my soprano with me and somebody convinced me to take it out and play for a minute on the street. Hearing me play for just that moment had her completely taken. Leisa had just gotten back from London and started asking everyone who this interesting new boy was.

  A couple days later, I ran into her again. I have the feeling she was lurking around near my place to meet me.

  I had gone out only to get cigarettes after a couple of wild, drunken days with Madge.

  When we got to my place, I looked in the mirror and saw that I still had on the makeup Madge had drawn on my face. I hadn’t been able to wash it off because Madge and I had had sex against the sink, which was now sitting on the floor, where it had crashed to pieces.

  Leisa looked at the sink and laughed really hard and somehow, as women often seem to, knew the entire story without my telling her a word.

  * * *

  —

  I was still playing the horn, but at this stage, in the East Village, nobody was doing what they actually knew how to do. All the painters had bands. All the musicians
were making little movies. I had worked hard for years on music but had to hide the fact that I actually knew how to play or that I practiced every day.

  My band, The Lounge Lizards, first played on June 4, 1979. We had two other possible names: The Sequined Eels and The Rotating Power Tools. Now I kind of wish that it had been The Rotating Power Tools.

  When you have a gig on Wednesday and you are on the way to the Xerox shop to make your first poster, it seems like it will just be that one concert. It will last twenty-four hours. It seemed most of the bands then lasted twenty-four hours.

  I didn’t imagine that years and years later we would be dragging this inappropriate name around that no longer matched the music as it got more serious and more elegant.

  Jon Ende gave me the name. I was on the way to make the Sequined Eels poster when Leisa came flying down the street, behind me, to tell me that The Lounge Lizards was better, that she had just talked to Jon Ende and that The Lounge Lizards was a better name.

  Leisa was the fastest runner. When we had no money, we used to dine and dash. I hated to run after eating, so when I was finished, I would walk out and head up Second Avenue about eight blocks from the restaurant. Leisa would come dashing up behind me. We’d run back to Third Street, giggling, and hide in the apartment. It was a good thing that she ran so fast or the band would have been The Sequined Eels. We rewrote the band’s name by hand at the Xerox place and ran off the posters.

  Leisa had the best ass. The best ass ever.

  She was whiter than me and she dyed her hair platinum blond, which increased the effect. I didn’t really believe that she was black until I met her dad. He was black. He was also short, bitter, and angry. He was an artist and an aikido master. I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me. He asked Leisa if I had spent a lot of time around autistic people, which I took as an insult and compliment all in one.