by John Lurie
But this is a new security team that Steve Mass, apparently, has been strong armed into hiring; this is their first night and they don’t know how cool I am supposed to be. One holds me as another one punches me in the face.
I feel my front tooth resting in the middle of my tongue.
Soon everyone in the club has heard that John Lurie has been punched in the face and is rushing up to me, giving me coke to numb the pain. I have never seen such an outpouring of cocaine.
“Here, rub it on your tooth, it will numb the pain.”
One night, years later, I was in a booth somewhere with Steve Rubell. I was trying not to do drugs and I guess Steve found me to be a drag. He took a bag of coke out of his pocket and flung it over toward me. The bag opened midair and I was covered in three grams of cocaine. So much for quitting. If you are suddenly covered in expensive cocaine, it would seem you must take it.
Anyway, the tooth was severed in half and the nerve was just dangling there. Later, at Bellevue Hospital, they took out the nerve with tweezers.
It took me months before I could play again. I tried several dentists who couldn’t make a new front tooth that fit like the old one, that didn’t screw up my embouchure.
Many people were suggesting I see this dentist known as “the musicians’ dentist.” He took a quick look at my tooth and said he couldn’t do anything about it, but was there anything else that I needed? Kept saying, “Is there anything you need from me?” I didn’t realize until I was two blocks away from his office, “Oh, the musicians’ dentist! I get it! Drugs! Maybe even pure cocaine!” I turned and rushed back to his office, but when I asked him if he could give me something for the pain, he said, “I can’t now. If you had asked before…but I can’t now.”
I had to have seven different front teeth put in and taken back out before I had one that worked. Where I could play the saxophone without air leaking out.
* * *
—
Haoui Montaug managed us for a little while. He cried when I told him it wasn’t working out a few months later. I felt bad because I liked Haoui. Haoui years later contracted AIDS and had decided that he was going to take certain pills to save himself the pain and indignity of a long, drawn-out death. He had it all planned out and was saying goodbye to people. He had it set for Friday. The IRS called him the Thursday before he was going to do it and told him that he was in serious trouble because he hadn’t paid any taxes for four years. Haoui asked them if they would mind calling back on Monday and hung up the phone. He went through with it. That was rough.
Haoui had set up our first gig outside New York, in Toronto. We were playing in a small room at something called the Spadina Hotel for three nights. The promoter’s name was Robin Wall. We’d played two nights and hadn’t gotten paid yet. We were supposed to get paid after each gig. Robin invites me to lunch the next day, explains that there have been some miscalculations, and says, “Well, why don’t you and the guys come over to my house for a barbecue tomorrow? It’ll be fun, we’ll cook up some snakes.”
Snakes? Did he mean steaks? But he says it again and again, snakes instead of steaks, and soon the slow horror sinks in. He’s nuts. Somebody told me he was later institutionalized. We never got paid.
Our first gig in Europe is just one night in Bologna, Italy. When we arrive, the band nearly loses it with the Italians, who are in a frenzy at the luggage carousel.
They are pushing and shoving to get at their luggage.
We are New Yorkers and not used to this touching. “We are not used to this touching. You have to stop this bizarre touching.”
They weren’t touching us in New York at JFK before we got on the plane. They weren’t touching us on the plane. Why the fuck is it supposed to be okay that they are touching and pushing us now?
Honestly, it even seems like some of their mustaches are suddenly two inches longer.
Then it gets much weirder.
We get picked up in a van that’s driven by a normal-looking guy, but with him is a man—I think I have to call him a man—with a neck beard; waist-length hair; a high, irritating voice; and breasts.
He gives me the creeps, not at all because he’s flaunting a mixture of genders, which I found somewhat courageous, but because he is just really creepy. And creepy is creepy. Neck beards are creepy.
Anton Fier takes out a joint that he smuggled in. Anton always has very, very strong pot. That weed that makes someone turn to you and say things like, “If your knees bent the other way, what would chairs look like?”
The driver smokes some and is not used to anything like it. He’s way too high.
We have to stop for gas.
There are six or seven guys hanging outside at the gas station on the pavement. It seems they all work at the gas station. Though there is no sane reason for this many people to be working at this gas station in the middle of nowhere.
They hear us speaking English to one another and don’t like it. The attendants start to grumble among themselves.
The driver feels he’s too high to drive and switches places with Neck Beard.
When our drivers get out of the car and switch places, the attendants really don’t like what they see.
This doesn’t feel so great.
They all start moving, slowly, threateningly, closer to the van. It feels like it might turn violent. They’re all holding wrenches and some other metal tools.
We are all very stoned. Too stoned. What’s happening here? Are we in real danger?
We are very, very stoned.
Neck Beard tries to drive away but can’t seem to face the idea of driving back onto the highway because he’s so high, so he just drives in circles, round and round the gas pumps.
The gas station attendants are getting closer and closer. I have been in this country for twenty minutes and this is happening. I am sure you could live in Italy for several hundred years without anything like this happening.
And then I think, Fuck you, you dumb motherfuckers. This shit is on now. You are going to step to us because we are speaking English on your little speck of turf in the universe and are threatened or offended or God knows what by us and our little friend with a neck beard and breasts? Fuck you. Fuck you, bring it on. We are going to fuck you up now.
And I look around at the guys in the band, who are not the toughest guys in the first place, but now they are so high I suspect they might understand the language squirrels speak better than what is happening in the situation here or what they should do next. This is not going to end well.
The Italians have crowbars and wrenches that they are beginning to show us as they approach. Neck Beard is driving in circles around the gas pump with this kind of gurgling sound, halfway between terror and singing, coming out of his throat.
Then suddenly he speeds up and drives over the curb with a loud thump, and we are in the middle of the highway with whizzing cars desperately trying to avoid us.
A driver is screaming something in Italian, which I am sure is close to, “Are you fucking idiots?? What is wrong with you?”
To which we could say in explanation, “We were about to be killed with hammers and crowbars and are too stoned to defend ourselves and are being driven by a neck beard who gurgles.” But it seems an unwieldy sentence to translate.
We get to the hotel and take a nap, then have an astoundingly great dinner.
We’re in Italy! It’s stunning. I love Bologna.
I am going to move here when I get old.
* * *
—
Piccolo and I decide to go for a walk.
“Let’s write down the name of the hotel, walk as far as we can, and then take a cab back.”
We write down the name on the neon flashing sign outside the hotel: “Albergo.”
We walk for hours. We’re exhausted from jet lag and walking and hail a cab
. It’s good we wrote down the name, because we are completely lost. We hand the driver the piece of paper with Albergo written on it. The driver is confused. He doesn’t understand.
“Dove?”
“Hotel Albergo.”
“Quale albergo?”
“Yes, yes, Hotel Albergo!”
But he doesn’t understand and we have to spend hours picking our way through streets, trying this way and that.
Albergo turns out to be Italian for “hotel.”
10
An Erection and an Alarm Clock
The second time I took heroin—not the first, the first time I just felt kind of fuzzy and tired—when I shot it, with Jon Ende and Leisa, it was perfect. It’s funny now, to say this after what heroin put me through. I certainly don’t want to be encouraging people to try it. Heroin leads to hell.
But this time was perfect.
The first time I took heroin I was with Leisa at Debbie Harry and Chris Stein’s place. This was a pretty big deal, to be invited there. Like we had arrived in a way. They were for real celebrities and had invited me to their home. And they were quite kind and supportive.
Debbie asked if I wanted a line. I thought she meant coke. She brought out these two little lines on a mirror. I thought, What? That is the smallest line of coke I have ever seen. Are they really this stingy?
I snorted it, and it tasted so much purer than the shit I had taken. Fifteen minutes later I asked for another line. I hope Debbie doesn’t mind my telling this. She is someone I have a lot of respect for and very much would not want to offend in any way. But it really wasn’t like Chris and Debbie were drug people. This was elegantly done, like it was a glass of exceptional wine.
I walked out onto the street thinking that it felt like I was made of rubber. Leisa started raving in an excited hush, “That was heroin! Really! I think we just took heroin!” She was saying it like we had won the lottery.
I thought that there was no way I’d get into it. I didn’t like the feeling and it certainly wasn’t going to help me work or have insights. And this is what I was interested in: I wanted drugs to give me insight, a transcendental experience, or to help me concentrate. I didn’t think that heroin could come close to helping me, at all, with what I was interested in.
A few weeks later, Leisa and I were in Jon Ende’s dingy apartment on Second Avenue, with his stinky cats and his pet frogs. Jon Ende’s apartment is the place we used for my apartment in Stranger Than Paradise. Whenever I see a photo or clip from Stranger Than Paradise, I don’t think about the movie, I think about Jon Ende.
He was quite brilliant. One of those people you might know who is brilliant but doesn’t really do anything. Doesn’t really want to do anything. And certainly would not put up with the kind of bullshit one must go through to get a project done. I have known many people who exploded into enormous celebrity, who are household names now, or others whose minds are considered to be very important. Jon Ende, like several others I knew, was not that. He was brilliant. Simple as that. And someone whose opinions on things I would listen to deeply.
The first time, I snorted heroin. This time Jon and Leisa convinced me to shoot up. This took quite a while, because I really didn’t like the idea. They were so excited to do it and almost made it like I was being silly not to. I had the flu and was lying on Jon’s couch. I didn’t want to move.
They kept saying, “This will clear up your flu in a moment! You have to do it!”
I was just lying there on the couch and would have said yes to pretty much anything to feel different than I did at that moment.
Leisa tied up my arm and injected me while I looked the other way.
Warmth. Warmth and sinking, just a nice sinking. Soft. Things were far away yet very clear. I’d passed through some exotic veil that only the initiated were allowed to penetrate. Pain dropped away from my body that I had never realized was there.
My nerve endings were coated with pleasure as I lay on Jon’s sofa.
I wanted to do this more often. I was absolutely fine. My cold and fever gently dropped away and were forgotten. At some point, I threw up, not unpleasant, whatsoever. God, I felt safe and warm, and it seemed like all my neuroses and self-loathing had floated off. But I think that safeness is what, in a way, is so appealing. You feel like nothing can hurt you, and if it does, it no longer matters.
I felt like, This is the evil thing they have warned you not to do? They have been lying to you. All along, they were lying.
At this exact moment my spiritual quest was gone. For years after, it was gone.
This shit was for real.
Then there were another several years trying to get away from it. That shit was even more real.
I started doing it once a week. This was the plan. Only do it once a week and you won’t get strung out.
Pretty quickly after that I would do things like set up the tape recorder with my horn out, reed wet and ready to go, shoot a speedball, coke and dope, and then rush to record whatever the drugs brought out. The disconcerting thing is that, in the beginning at least, what was coming out was different and amazing. Not You thought it was good because you were high. I would listen to it days later and it would be good—actually, good doesn’t do it justice, it was fucking great, the odd rhythms, the otherworldly overtones.
* * *
—
Four of us were shooting speedballs at my place on Third Street. Leisa had mixed everybody’s shots and put in too much coke. I went first. It was really cold out. One of those biting New York February days. All the windows were closed and taped.
I needed air! Immediately. Too much coke in the shot. I jumped up on the windowsill, ripped the tape off, pulled the upper frame down—none of my windows opened at the bottom—and stuck my head out for air.
I held my head out in the freezing New York daylight for several minutes.
When I got down from the window, Leisa and our two friends were all standing on different window ledges with their heads sticking out.
My friends were wild. Bruce Balboni overdosed at his own birthday party. He was in the bathtub being shot up with saline, people trying to revive him.
Rene Ricard went around singing, “It’s my party and I’ll die if I want to.”
There was this thing on the news about how all these junkies were ending up in the hospital, going blind with weird bumps on their heads. People I knew started to get it. Leisa was saying that she thought she had it but I didn’t pay any attention. Thought that she was being silly.
The next morning she really can’t see and she’s got all these bumps under her platinum hair. This was so terrifying, I cannot tell you.
She really cannot see.
We’re lying on my bed, a stinky foam mattress on the floor, and I can see by her gaze that she’s half-blind. I run my hand past her face and there is no reaction.
Everyone got better in a few days. What had caused the condition was a lemon on a chest of drawers in a room at the Chelsea Hotel.
Bobo Shaw, the drummer who played with Miles Davis, among others, was living at the Chelsea Hotel. Bobo was selling this brown dope that was very thick, and in order to shoot the dope most people cut it with lemon juice from a half of a lemon that Bobo had saved for this purpose. The lemon had gone moldy and it was causing these odd symptoms. Amazing to me, the idea that there was all this concerned stuff on the news about a plague attacking junkies—“Scientists are mystified!”—when it was just this moldy half lemon on Bobo’s counter because he was too lazy to buy another one.
Now I also knew that Leisa had secretly gotten high without me, which was not the deal. We were only supposed to get high once a week, together. Of course, along with massive amounts of sexual cheating, we were cheating by getting high without each other. If I got high the night before, I would have a line down the left side of my face from my chee
kbone to my jaw. A line that lasted for twenty-five years and is still somewhat there today. It was like a road map, and early on, it was only there if I got high. You can see an example of these lines in the face of Chet Baker or Keith Richards.
Leisa would see it in the morning and yell, betrayed, “You have the drug line!”
Bobo had really lost it to drugs. There was a rumor that he had lost an arm when he was in jail, an even bigger tragedy for Bobo because he was a drummer. In the end, this turned out to not be true.
One time, when he had been sent off to Rikers, I sent him drumsticks and a practice pad. Seemed like a nice thing to do, so he could keep up with his playing. But when he got out he scoffed at me. Like it was a stupid thing to do. How could I be that corny?
The lemon story wasn’t particularly revealing to me because I knew how unhygienic Bobo was.
A few months before, we had been taking drugs all night and as the sun was coming up, he asked if he could crash at my place on the floor. Bobo fell asleep, and I went out and braved Third Street to get some cigarettes. When I got back there was this strong smoldering smell. I thought the place was on fire.
“Bobo, wake up! There’s a fire! Wake up! We have to get out!”
He rolled over and said, “No, that’s okay, John, I just took off my shoes.”
Bobo and Lindzee Smith were partners in crime. They were always together doing this scam or that. The odd thing was that they were both so talented, but whatever talents they had were put on the back burner for the pursuit and idolatry of heroin and cocaine.
There were lots of great stories about Lindzee, who was an actor and theater director of some repute. He had broken into an abandoned storefront on the Lower East Side to do a play. I think a Joe Orton play. Lindzee did everything himself: the set, the advertising, the music, directing, and acting. He had gone to his place on Seventh and Avenue D to pick up a boombox that he had borrowed for music in the performance. This was a notoriously bad block during this period. He gets held up. He hands over the $6 he has but refuses to give up the boombox because he needs it for the play. He gets stabbed in the side.