The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  Lindzee comes back to the storefront with the boombox, does the performance bleeding all over the stage, and only after the play is over, does he go off to the hospital to have his wounds taken care of.

  You think you’re for real? Fuck you. Lindzee was for real for real.

  Another, less noble story that I heard: Lindzee used to get dope for himself by copping for other people. If you came in from New Jersey and didn’t know where to go, or you were a record company exec or something and didn’t travel in this world, Lindzee would buy a bag for you and keep one for himself as commission. Lindzee had a certain contempt for these people, either because they weren’t hip enough to cop for themselves or because they were from New Jersey—a crime in itself in those days.

  This guy gets Lindzee to cop for him. The guy has nowhere to shoot up and asks Lindzee if he can use his apartment. They go up to Lindzee’s second floor apartment and get high. The guy wants to get more. Lindzee warns him that it’s strong, but the guy insists. Lindzee runs out and gets him another two bags.

  The guy then ODs.

  Lindzee tries to revive him but with no success. He can’t call an ambulance because there will be police and Lindzee will go to jail. He can’t just leave him in his apartment and he doesn’t know what to do.

  So Lindzee picks the guy up and drops him out of his second floor bathroom window. Because he uses the bathroom window, the guy will fall in back of the building and won’t be found for a while. If they don’t notice the bruises and broken bones from the two flight fall, maybe the police will just think that the guy was getting high in back of the building and OD’d there.

  But the guy is still alive.

  Some hours later he manages to crawl around to the front of the building, where he is discovered by the Puerto Rican dealers who run the block. They are furious with Lindzee because this kind of thing is going to bring unwanted attention to the neighborhood. Lindzee can’t go back to his own apartment for weeks because he hears that the Puerto Rican dealers are going to kill him, and every time I see him during a several week period, he is wearing the same clothes. And then later, clothes he borrowed that look like they might fit a child.

  * * *

  —

  I have been on a three day binge and finally go to sleep. I must have slept some fourteen hours when, from my sleep, I sense someone in the apartment. I spring out of bed, naked, with a big sleep hard-on. I have the alarm cocked over my head, as a weapon. I will kill whoever it is with my clock.

  I see a fat man with a beard and Popsicle stains on his T-shirt. He’s just standing there in my kitchen holding a revolver. I lurch forward ready to attack.

  “I’m a cop! I’m a cop!” he screams at me.

  I am not awake and it takes a moment to understand.

  Then I say, “Oh,” and put my hands up over my head. My hard-on kind of wobbling back and forth in the wind.

  “God, I thought I was going to have to shoot you. You live here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you put some clothes on? You’ve been robbed.”

  Someone had broken into my apartment while I was sleeping. Stolen my horns and been caught. The police saw this guy that they recognized as having been picked up before for breaking and entering. He was walking up Bowery with a saxophone case, and they stopped him because they didn’t think he was a musician and wondered what he was doing with a saxophone. On the outside of the case was my name and address. The cops were very nice not to mention the syringes or the empty drug packages on the living room table.

  They brought me outside to identify my stuff. The guy they caught was in the backseat of the squad car. He stared at me and smiled. His stare went right through me, like, I could have killed you, you sleeping fool.

  11

  Paris. Vomiting and Then More Vomiting.

  Back then there were only two channels on late at night. I would lie on my ragged foam pad that pretended to be a bed and watch a little black and white TV on the floor.

  You could only watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns, which were fairly pleasant, or Joe Franklin.

  Joe Franklin was this odd little guy who must have somehow been connected to Broadway in the real theater days but had no business being on TV.

  When an author was on, and I swear he did this every time, he would hold up the author’s book, so he, Joe Franklin, could look at the cover, but the camera could not see the cover, only the back of Joe Franklin’s little hand.

  He seemed sweet but very dopey, very pudgy, and very nervous.

  Once I had seen all the Mary Tyler Moore Shows, I started watching Joe Franklin. Which I have to admit was fairly fascinating in a bizarre kind of way.

  One night, he had on Sri Chinmoy to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Sri Chinmoy was a guru I knew a little about but not much. I know he emphasized doing extended, austere physical exercise to put one into an exalted state, but didn’t know much else.

  I found this an odd pairing, Sri Chinmoy and Joe Franklin. It just didn’t make any sense. Who set this up?

  Then something really amazing happened. They brought out a cake with like fifty lit candles on it. Joe Franklin explained, “Well, Sri, it is our custom in America that when it is your birthday, you make a wish and then blow out the candles.”

  Sri Chinmoy just sat there without speaking. His eyes rolled up into his head.

  Joe Franklin was going, “Come on, Sri, blow out the candles! Blow out the candles!”

  Then, without even visibly inhaling, Sri Chinmoy just went pffttt. There was no effort in the exhale. The sea of candles went out like they had been hit by a tornado. Whoosh! Gone out. Only smoke rising off the cake.

  It was just nuts. It was so nuts I started calling people and asking if they had seen it. It was four in the morning. No one appreciated the call or understood the importance.

  I remember one of the people was Evan. I seem to have always been waking up Evan, in the middle of the night, for most of his life. He said, “John…,” in that way he has for all these years, and I laughed and hung up.

  * * *

  —

  One night, I was lying on my little pad watching Mary Tyler Moore at four in the morning.

  Outside, the bum who yelled, “Armageddon, Armageddon!” over and over was yelling, “Armageddon, Armageddon!” over and over.

  The monk with the drum came through. There used to be this monk who walked around Manhattan, shaved head and robe, and popped on this little drum the size of a Ping-Pong paddle. I am sure he never spoke. You could hear him coming, and the pitch of the drum would change as he got closer.

  So outside, the sound on the street was Pip Pip Pip Pip, Armageddon, Armageddon, Pip Pip Pip Pop, Armageddon, Armageddon, Pop Pop POP POP, Armageddon, Armageddon. Charles Ives had nothing on Third Street at four in the morning.

  I can’t tell you how much I appreciated that monk. Just a little tiny breath and funnel to some kind of light.

  A few years later, I was on East Tenth Street on my way over to play ball at Tompkins Square Park but was in the middle of hideous negotiations on a movie score deal with Hollywood. It was eating up my mind. These people are monsters, they are taking the soul out of culture. I don’t care about the money, well, I do a little, but they cannot fuck with the music. They don’t know what they are doing, they cannot fuck with the music because some producer who is the nephew of some movie mogul hears the score at nine in the morning and pronounces that he doesn’t like violins because he hasn’t had his special drip coffee with almond milk yet. So all the violins will be removed and the piece will be left with bongos and banjo (which has actually happened to me). No, they cannot do this.

  My head was locked into this awful thing and wouldn’t stop.

  I was walking by a mosque when the imam stepped out on the street, with the call to prayer.

  He had
a beautiful voice. And his call to prayer was right there with anything—the imploring beauty of it was right there with Nusrat or Coltrane or whoever you want to pick. Kurt Cobain? It was beautiful.

  I stopped in my tracks in front of him and said, “Oh. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart. Thank you.”

  He looked at me funny, as probably he should have done, and I went over to play basketball.

  Anyway, it was four a.m. on Third Street, when the phone rang. It was some guy calling from Paris named Fabrice. He ran a club called Les Bains Douches and he wanted to bring The Lounge Lizards over to play.

  We talked about it for a minute and he realized he couldn’t afford to pay for the hotels and flights for five people. Seemed a little odd to me that he had not thought that out a little further before he called me at four a.m., but okay.

  I called him back the next night and suggested that I could come and do a saxophone solo.

  I had done a couple of solo concerts that had gone very well.

  He said okay, and I was going to Paris. This was pretty exciting, or at least it was then; someone would pay for me to come to Paris to play. Later it became, “Fuck, I have to go to Paris?”

  But back then, how exciting could it get?

  A French journalist, Patrick Zerbib, who wrote for Actuel, was in New York, had seen the band, and wanted to do an article.

  Zerbib was a decent guy. I could tell this as I stood on my radiator to toss him down the keys when he was out on Third Street amid the mayhem of bums. He was out there smiling. He enjoyed it. Third Street was really out of control by then. It smelled of piss and uncollected garbage, and urine and more uncollected garbage, and more piss. On the southeast corner were three very nice brownstones, one of which was Phil Glass’s home, and I think he still lives there. But that was closer to Second Avenue and not in the pit of the avalanche of stink in the middle of the block where I lived.

  Zerbib goes out on a limb writing this giant article on me called “King of Third Street.” Actuel had a lot of clout then, and if they said I was cool, it was verified that I was the hip new thing.

  I suppose this is good. Is this good? I am still not sure. But this is what it was.

  I’d been to Paris before. I was living in London and had gone to see my friend Rick Morrison perform in Einstein on the Beach by Robert Wilson, first in Avignon and then later, a second time, in Paris.

  I took the train to the ferry and then another train and ended up in Paris. Wilson’s early work really floored me, and I thought that the original production of Einstein on the Beach was great. What had really stuck with me was going to watch the rehearsals in New York.

  I was staying in a cheap hotel on Barbès. I got food poisoning and was vomiting my brains out.

  I was too sick to travel back to London, but I only had twenty English pounds left. If I paid for the hotel for another two days, which seemed about how long it would take for me to be able to travel, I wouldn’t have enough left for the ferry. I stumbled out of the room to change money for the ferry ticket and stood in line at the currency exchange, shivering. I handed over my twenty pounds and the woman gave me back something like five hundred francs. She had given me double what I was owed. I normally would have pointed out her mistake, but this was a blessing beyond blessings. I went back to my room and slept with a smile on my face until the next morning.

  This kind of thing happened one other time, when I was completely broke and in trouble because I was so broke. I was living on Third Street, in my apartment with no electricity because I have not paid Con Edison. A large pool is collecting under the refrigerator. I can receive calls but not make them. This so the phone company can have the pleasure of calling you to harass you, but so you can’t call anyone to say what assholes the phone company is.

  I woke up with no food, no cigarettes. This is no good. I go downstairs and open my mailbox to find a letter from Pete Liardi. Pete Liardi is from the Elm Park days in Worcester, and I have not talked to him in some eight or nine years. I open the letter and there is a hundred dollar bill in there, with a note saying, “The C-note is for cigs.” Which is the first thing it went toward. Pete had read something about the band somewhere and sent me this. I don’t even know how he got my address. Isn’t that strange? This is the most broke I ever was and then out of nowhere is a hundred dollar bill in my mailbox.

  * * *

  —

  I go to the airport to fly to Paris for my solo concert, but when I get to the airport, my ticket is for Brussels. I find out later that New York–to–Brussels is infinitely cheaper than New York–to–Paris, and this little skunk has flown me to Brussels without even telling me.

  I’m at the Brussels airport expecting somebody to pick me up, but there is no one.

  I’ve got no French money, the banks are closed, and I don’t speak much of the language. I manage to get to the train station in Brussels and change enough money to buy a ticket to Paris and have a few francs left over for a hot dog and a beer. This was really a great hot dog.

  Eventually, I get to Paris and stay at the writer Jackie Berroyer’s house. He’s told Zerbib that I can stay at his house because he thinks it will be interesting. His English is horrible, but I can see that he’s very bright and he is a very sweet little guy.

  Berroyer and I spent hours trying to talk to each other in broken French and English. He introduced me to chevaline, raw horse meat. At first I thought it was a hideous idea and then I thought, Is there a reason it is okay to eat a cow and not a horse? And it was just fucking delicious.

  Heroin was very cheap and much better in Paris. Everybody I knew was taking it. So for three days I pretty much only took heroin, cocaine, ate horse meat, and drank champagne.

  Life seemed really unusual and wonderful and exotic. I knew I was tempting some kind of edge, but what could go wrong?

  A few months before, I had done a saxophone solo at Carnegie Recital Hall. It was the perfect room for this. The acoustics held the tone of the saxophone like a warm glow.

  This was not the case at Les Bains Douches. I remember every bad concert that I ever did. They are etched in my brain, never to go away. This one was one of them. This was a disaster.

  I step out onto the stage and there is just this cheap microphone. There are no monitors and no reverb. I start to play. Each note sounds thin and icky and comes out and dies immediately. There’s no resonance, there’s no tone. If you are playing by yourself and there’s no resonance, you have to play harder and harder and faster and faster to fill the room with sound. I was exhausted fifteen minutes in and I could see that this crowd of ultra-hip French people had already pronounced me a bore after the first three.

  I know it isn’t going to get any better, so I just say thank you and good night and go into the dressing room, which is filled with people taking drugs.

  A guy I knew a little bit from New York is on the floor, frantically looking under the couch for his works. He’s screaming. Someone comes backstage and says that everyone is going to be furious unless I play more. People have paid a lot of money for their tickets. I say, “No, they hate it. Why do they want more of something they hate? And it sounds like hell, they should hate it.”

  Zerbib comes back and says he had gone out on a limb recommending me so highly in the article and please would I play a little more. So I go back out and play some more, really only for Zerbib, and then quit.

  This wasn’t a music venue, this was a place to see and be seen. I learned then, very painfully, to be careful about where I played in the future and to make sure that the equipment was going to be acceptable, although it is pretty much impossible to control.

  There were three more concerts booked: one in Poitiers, one in Lyon, and one in Geneva. I had a fight with Fabrice from Les Bains Douches about money for airfare and left Paris for Poitiers. I was starting to not feel so good. I had no appetite.
>
  I had taken heroin only ten times before, over a pretty long period of time. I had never taken it three days in a row, as I had in Paris. After taking it ten times or so, I had just begun to feel like, This stuff is great. It can really be used to create things. They have been lying to me about heroin.

  But now I didn’t feel so good and started to assume it was dope sickness. I didn’t really have any idea what dope sickness was like and didn’t have anyone to ask, out on the road as I was.

  I took the train to Poitiers and did a show there. On the way there on the train, I was thinking, Shit, I am in Europe, they paid me to come here, they paid me to play music. This is something special in one’s life. It really is.

  I was opening for Carla Bley. Since this was an actual music hall and because it was Carla Bley, the equipment was good and the sound system was good.

  D Sharp, a sweet little drummer who had played once with The Lounge Lizards, stopped by my dressing room. I told him about Paris, how badly it had gone, and that I was vomiting all the time and didn’t know what to make of it.

  We all know these moments, where things are going so wrong and you just need one human being to hear you. Well, D Sharp did that for me. He heard me. He sat there and heard me.

  He died shortly after that and it broke my heart. I was never able to repay him for the human being he was to me at that moment. I did send his widow all the money I had at that time, but fuck money, money isn’t a real currency when it comes down to it.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t feel so good. I take the train to Lyon and am booked to play at a college. What’s wrong with me? Am I dope sick? Is this what dope sickness is like? I drink a bottle of Pernod and go out to do the concert. Students have booked this show. It is disorganized and there are only about a hundred people in a giant auditorium.