From 1984 to 1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face. Lurie, the star of the Jim Jarmusch films “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law” and the saxophone-playing leader of the jazz-punk group the Lounge Lizards, was droopy and skinny and intensely charismatic. His “Down by Law” co-star, Roberto Benigni, described him in his fractured English as “a very big actor and musicist that in the world everybody know . . . between Ray Charles and Brigitte Bardot.” Lurie wore a Borsalino fedora and old suits and painted expressionist album covers and picked up girls at the Mudd Club and snorted coke at the Palladium with Steve Rubell and Rick James. He got addicted to heroin, but kicked it; he got hepatitis, but kicked that, too. He was young and cocksure and he wouldn’t truckle. Between Fourteenth Street and Canal—the known universe, basically—he was the man.
In the nineties, Lurie became less cool but more interesting. He mouthed off to Woody Allen and Barry Sonnenfeld and let his acting career go. His money disappeared, of course, but he co-wrote Conan O’Brien’s “Late Night” theme song, and his “Get Shorty” soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy. He made a beguiling album that purported to be the influential blues stylings of a half-Jewish, half-African mental patient named Marvin Pontiac. And “Fishing with John,” a tongue-in-cheek cable show about his fishing trips with wild men like Dennis Hopper, showcased all his ingenuity and lacerating candor. Tom Waits got so mad at Lurie during their trip that the two stopped speaking. Matt Dillon complained about his episode, Lurie recalls, saying, “You made me look dumb.” “No,” Lurie replied. “God did that.” (Dillon says that he doesn’t remember the conversation.) And so ended that relationship, too.
At the conclusion of an ice-fishing episode co-starring Willem Dafoe, the narrator announced that both men had starved to death. In fact, Dafoe is still alive and still speaking to Lurie—or in theory still speaking to him. A year and a half ago, at the age of fifty-six, Lurie disappeared. Dafoe said, “Maybe this reclusiveness is his way of continuing to try to make sense of things—you could never separate John’s work from his personal challenges.”
What happened first was that Lurie was stricken with a mysterious disease that confined him to his SoHo apartment for six years. Then, in 2008, he and his closest friend, a younger artist named John Perry, had an explosive rupture, and Lurie went into hiding, believing that Perry intended to kill him. There were certainly grounds for concern, as Perry was stalking him and saying things like “Scumbag, one day you’ll be gone and this earth will be delivered from the virus of your existence.” Lurie’s improvised witness-protection program has taken him from the island of Grenada to a house in Big Sur, California, belonging to his friend Flea, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, to an obscure village in Turkey. In October, Lurie began living incognito in a rented house in Palm Springs, California. He keeps a ninja baton and a can of pepper spray by his bed, and only seven people have his new cell-phone number. He calls them late at night, asking, “Can I come home?” There is no easy answer.
One day in June of 2002, Lurie worked out hard to prepare for an expected nude scene in the HBO prison drama “Oz.” Afterward, he went to the West Village restaurant Da Silvano, still thinking about ways to enhance his appearance—“I wanted to make my penis look enormous onscreen”—and suddenly the world was spinning violently and he couldn’t move. “I had never been afraid to die before,” Lurie said. “I had always thought either you go to the light or it fades to black. But now this creepy, ignoble, wormlike force rose up in me, saying, ‘I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!’ ”
The following weeks brought a cascade of strange and overpowering symptoms: flashing lights and roaring sounds, a sensation like rain pouring on his skin, a Kryptonite-like reaction to Windex, an inability to hold so much as a skillet in his left hand. His condition was diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and about ten other things, including postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, a verdict he resented because its acronym was so lame. Lurie finally came to believe that he had chronic Lyme disease—a condition whose very existence, as he wryly acknowledged, was fiercely disputed in the medical community.
He often couldn’t leave his apartment, let alone play an instrument. When he felt up to it, he worked on his memoirs, and he did some voice-overs, hawking Toyota Tacomas in his growling baritone. He also began painting again, taking it more seriously this time. Lurie soon had a number of solo shows; as his canvases began selling, for up to fifty-five thousand dollars, the Times proclaimed that “music’s loss may turn out to be art’s gain.” He’d move among four paintings at once, constructing vivid, childlike scenarios around the topics of sex, perplexity, God, and bunny rabbits—treating his brush the way he used to treat his saxophone, as if he’d just found it on the street. If the horse he’d painted had a mane that was way too short, he’d save the painting by titling it “Horse with Mullet.”
But much of the time he just lay on his green couch, smoking and wincing at the slightest noise. During this period, the person who seemed most in tune with Lurie’s needs—other than the bar owner who came by faithfully with fried chicken from Blue Ribbon—was John Perry. Perry was a six-foot-three, two-hundred-and-five-pound former college decathlon standout who rode a Kawasaki, knew judo, and cut his own hair. Capable and engaging, he had a soft voice and a deliberative manner, like a bear awakened early from hibernation. He lived to paint portraits and still-lifes, and only when he received the occasional eviction notice from his seven-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment on the Upper East Side would he put in a few days as a construction worker or a substitute teacher, keeping the anxious, scroungy details, like much of his private life, to himself.
Perry and Lurie got to know each other in the early nineties, at the SoHo restaurant Lucky Strike, where they both played in the back-room poker game. Lurie was a voluble half-Welsh, half-Russian-American Jew, and Perry a reticent half-Korean, half-Lithuanian-American Jew, but there was an instant affinity. Soon, they were playing pickup basketball with a group of bouncers, night-club managers, and drug dealers, most of them black and a decade or so younger than Lurie—warriors who did battle on the playground before sunrise, while lesser men were sleeping on percale sheets.
Lurie said, “After I got sick, my artist friends, except for Flea and Steve Buscemi, fled from me. And then I had my tough-guy friends, where the biggest guy would take the biggest piece of chicken; they didn’t believe in evolution, let alone an internal life. John was both, but he really had my back, and I loved him. He seemed like Abraham Lincoln, the most decent, thoughtful person.” Perry told me that Lurie was the only one he could talk to about his feelings of depression and misgiving, the only one who not only wouldn’t think him weak but would respond with his own uncertainties.
The men had several extended breaches, over such questions as who failed to read whose autobiographical writings fast enough, but by the summer of 2008 Perry was again Lurie’s mainstay. He taught him how to paint in oils, set up his new Apple computer, gave him a 3 A.M. haircut, and dropped by three nights a week to play cutthroat heads-up poker for a couple of hundred dollars. Lurie’s girlfriend, Jill Goodwin, said, “I’d be with John at 2 A.M., and then John Perry would show up, and I’d be pissed.” When Perry left the apartment, he’d say, “Ganbatte,” a Japanese word meaning, in his loose translation, “Call on your fighting spirit.”
Lurie knew that Perry’s stoic countenance masked some turbulent impulses. In 1999, a bouncer at a club called Life beat Perry up after he got into a drunken scuffle. Perry, a frequent drug user at the time, quit pot and cocaine for a week, readying himself. Then he returned to the club on a Saturday night and dove over the ropes, getting the bouncer in a choke hold before the other bouncers beat him down. Perry was arrested for assault and sentenced to a day of community service, washing sanitation trucks in Central Park. A few years later, he fought off two men who broke into his apartment, apparently looking for drugs, beating them with the weapons at hand in his kitchen: a machete and a flute. In 2008, he was arrested for using a baseball bat to bar two off-duty cops from looking at a vacant apartment in his building.
Early in their friendship, when Lurie played the as yet unreleased Lounge Lizards album “Queen of All Ears” for Perry, he was surprised to see tears rolling down his friend’s cheeks. “You really are an artist,” Perry said. “What am I going to do if I hear that in public? I can’t be seen crying.” In October, 2008, Lurie took Perry out to lunch for his forty-third birthday, and Perry suddenly remarked, “I don’t think I’ll be able to stand it when you’re dead.” “I’m going to live way longer than you,” Lurie replied.
Despite Perry’s admiration for him, Lurie told me, “John never hung on my coattails like other people did—I really felt we were equals.” Perry’s independence was both a comfort and a provocation to Lurie, who, like many middle-aged artists, kept himself vital by seeking out younger friends and lovers. (Jill Goodwin is thirty-one.) Perry told me, “It would be natural to assume that we all felt John was the man, the way he had been, but the truth is that, downtown, we”—the club-hopping buccaneers Perry hung out with—“were the famous ones, in a sense, and John was like our little brother.” Perry said that he and Lurie sometimes competed for women—“John was older, but he could be funny with girls, and if they knew his celebrity that always helped”—but added, “I didn’t need John to get in anywhere, or to get laid. There was nothing John had that I wanted, except more recognition for my work.”
In the fall of 2008, Perry asked Lurie for a favor. The younger artist was going to make an instructional television pilot titled “The Drawing Show,” hoping to interest PBS in airing a series that would raise his profile. He asked Lurie to pose for him, and though Lurie had been turning down film work for years—the strong lights inflamed his symptoms—he agreed, and even offered to help pay for the shoot. (Although Perry was flat broke, he declined, not wanting to be further beholden to Lurie, and borrowed the necessary six thousand dollars elsewhere.) On the evening of November 8, 2008, Perry brought a five-man crew to a friend’s apartment near Gramercy Park to film his and Lurie’s collaboration.
Footage from the beginning of the shoot shows the two men facing each other, handsomely framed, with Lurie beside Perry’s easel. Each had a shaved head, and each looked keen and attentive under spotlights that left a well of darkness between them. As Perry roughed out Lurie’s face with charcoal, he explained what he was seeing—“His left eyeball, which is to my right, is a little bit lower than his right one”—and Lurie pursed his lips, then smiled. He had told himself to suppress his natural inclination to take over, but when Perry lapsed into silence, absorbed in depicting what he saw, Lurie would prompt him by asking why he closed one eye, or what he was using the eraser for. Perry’s observations about composition and technique were apt and intriguing. You could see how, with editing, there might be a show in the idea. But some of Lurie’s sallies tried Perry’s patience:
When Lurie arrived, around 6:30 P.M., he had been struck by the crew’s indifference to him. Celebrity is the power to rivet attention, and Lurie realized that his riveting faculties had lapsed. He told Perry, “When I went into my house, I was famous—I come out six years later and nobody knows who I am,” meaning it as a cultural observation: I am Rip Van Winkle, returned but unknown. Perry thought the remark seemed self-involved, as did Lurie’s asking him, “Am I going to get out of here by ten o’clock? I have an appointment to get laid.” (He and Goodwin were not then together.)
Lurie now regrets the crudeness of the remark, and told me that when Perry looked stressed out he called his date, a librarian, and cancelled. As it happened, the shoot ran long and took a toll. A few hours in, Lurie was clearly ill, wincing and slumping in his chair. Sweat bloomed on Perry’s forehead as he eyed his model—“You’re doing great”—and haltingly explained to the cameras why he was erasing his original lines and hatching in subtly different ones: “It’s really the essence of drawing—to separate what you think is there from what is actually there.”
Around 10:30 P.M., in the middle of a take, Lurie, who by now felt as if bees were stinging him all over, said, “I really am in agony. I just—I can’t handle it. You’ve got to figure out how to make it shorter.” Perry looked stunned. “How much longer?” Lurie asked, head down. “I could use another fifteen, twenty minutes,” Perry replied. After a moment, Lurie said, “Let’s just keep going.” As Perry raced to put on the finishing touches—mouth, cheek, shirt—the portrait grew fuzzy and self-doubting.
Seven minutes later, Perry stretched and said, “Want to take a look at it, John?” Lurie growled, “Naw, I gotta go.” “That’s part of the thing,” Perry said, dismayed. He had the apartment only for the night, and he needed to film Lurie’s reaction to the drawing, and get footage of him from Perry’s point of view, so the audience could see what the artist saw. Lurie rose, put a hand on Perry’s shoulder, and said, “Bye, everybody. Sorry.” As the crew was huddling with Perry, reassuring him that they could still make the program work, his cell phone rang: it was Lurie, who had collapsed in the hallway. Perry went and helped him to his feet and walked him out to a cab, neither man saying much. As Lurie pulled away, he was struck by Perry’s expression: “He looked intense, lost, childlike, and large. Later, I thought, That was the moment he decided to kill me.”
In Palm Springs, Lurie rents a small two-bedroom house with a tiny pool. He keeps the blinds drawn against the desert sun, but there isn’t much to see inside: a guitar and an amplifier; a few of his canvases on the beige walls; and a gleaming silver case containing an oxygen tank and the apparatus he uses to inject ozone into his veins. Lurie heard about ozone therapy, a controversial and potentially dangerous treatment, from Flea, and began going to a doctor for ozone three times a week. In June, 2008, after six months of injections, he was able to do his first pullup in six years, and he began to believe, before the Perry mess, that he would recover completely.
One recent morning, Lurie was chewing Nicorette gum and gazing at his painting “Twelve Bottoms Against Nature.” He’d applied too much linseed oil, and the surface shone like a puddle at a gas station. “You do realize I don’t know what I’m doing, right?” he announced. “Motherfucker!” Are you a painter now? I asked. “I’m a school of thought,” he said, deadpan.
Lurie lay on the couch, then blew a few bars on a harmonica. The harmonica was his first instrument; he started when he was fifteen, and quickly got so good that he played onstage with John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat. He was wearing a muscle shirt and loose khaki pants, having gained sixty pounds since back in the day. Often, he and his assistant, Nesrin Wolf, spend mornings and even afternoons in their pajamas, trying, usually in vain, to reach the police or the District Attorney or the F.B.I. to discuss John Perry. Wolf, a thirty-three-year-old Turkish immigrant who attractively resembles a female Michael Jackson, began working for Lurie in New York, and came along on his travels in the Sancho Panza role. The two bicker a lot, fondly, and she often calls him gicik—Turkish for “an annoyance.”
Wolf doesn’t drive, so Lurie drove her to Jensen’s market to do his shopping. While she was inside picking up salmon, he considered the white-haired ladies ambling around the parking lot and pursed his lips. Palm Springs is a golf-obsessed retirement community, and he doesn’t get recognized there, even when he buttonholes strangers at the local Starbucks for a little conversation. Lurie said, “This thing that’s happening now wouldn’t be happening if I were more famous, Tom Cruise famous, because I’d be insulated. And it wouldn’t be happening at all if I were less famous. Somehow I got it just exactly wrong.”
Sometime after 1 A.M. on the night of the video shoot, Lurie reached Perry on the phone and said, “I’m upset.” Perry said, “You’re upset? You’re upset with me?,” and hung up. Perry had just walked the three and a half miles to his apartment. On the way, he took a detour onto the Queensboro Bridge and stood on its railing, feeling the wind. Lighting a cigarette, he stared down at the East River and considered plunging into it, thinking, This was all for nothing, what a fucking waste. Perry’s girlfriend, Laksmi Hedemark, told me, “John was relying on John Lurie’s celebrity to help with the show, and I know he regrets that, because he betrayed his own belief that there really wasn’t a difference between them.”
Lurie was nearly as low. He was depressed by his inability to get the job done, and also disheartened by Perry’s apparent lack of concern: “He was looking right at me, but he didn’t see me. He was thinking totally about the show.” He laughed, sadly. “And I get that, it’s what I did with the band—‘You’ve got a blister on your thumb? Play. You’ve got strep throat? Play.’ The show comes first.”
In the days that followed, Lurie and Perry e-mailed each other a series of apologies—but Perry also, on a hunch, called Time Warner Cable. There had been a pay-per-view boxing match between Roy Jones, Jr., and Joe Calzaghe the night of the shoot, and Perry, pretending to be Lurie, discovered that Lurie had ordered it shortly after he left. That suggested to Perry that, whether or not Lurie was actually feeling lousy, he had gone home in order to watch the bout. (Lurie says that he ordered the fight as a distraction and watched less than a single round.)
When Perry sent Lurie a seven-minute assembly of footage from the shoot, on November 23rd, Lurie said that he needed some time before he could watch it; he was still feeling bruised. The next day, he e-mailed to say, “I suffered agony for you—it was met with disappointment and derision. I don’t remember anyone suffering agony for me.” Hedemark told me, “Women have more issues with this, but, when men ignore you, you’re left with your worries and anxieties. So when John Lurie did that it was like the unintentional first move in the battle.”
Perry began speed-dialling Lurie’s apartment. After he had called thirty or forty times, Nesrin Wolf finally answered and said that Lurie was taking a nap. Perry replied, “Go wake his ass up.” Then he called back, again and again. At 2:30 A.M., Lurie picked up his phone to make a call, and Perry was on the line. “Come down and talk to me, cocksucker!” he demanded, and then began ringing the doorbell. Perry was downstairs. “I thought he could easily break in and climb up the fire escape,” Lurie told me. To make him leave, Lurie agreed to recompense Perry for the cost of the shoot.
That night, Lurie moved out to the Bowery Hotel, and in the morning he e-mailed Perry, saying that he didn’t owe him any money, and that his threats amounted to extortion. Perry promptly went to his local police station and made up a claim that Lurie had threatened to hit him with a baseball bat. He then left Lurie a voice mail, saying in blank tones that when he saw Lurie whatever measures he might take would be “self-defense, because I’ve already gone to the police.”
That afternoon, Lurie went to his local station house and filed a complaint against Perry for harassment. He’d already phoned several friends of his and Perry’s from the basketball days, hoping that they could talk Perry down. They remember telling him that Perry believed Lurie had screwed up the shoot and therefore had to pay in cash or in apprehension, but that he had said he wasn’t going to harm Lurie.
Lurie wasn’t reassured. “I’ve seen this movie,” he said. “The stalker convinces everyone he’s not doing anything, and then . . .” One night, G. Calvin Weston, a former Lounge Lizards drummer, stayed with Lurie in his SoHo apartment. Weston recalled, “He had a baseball bat by the door, a fireplace poker a few feet away, a weight bar near that—weapons every few feet.” The police hadn’t acted on the harassment case, because Lurie kept temporizing about whether to prosecute his friend. So Lurie—feeling that New York had become unsafe, and that his friends were too timid to take a stand on his behalf—decamped to Grenada for two weeks with a woman he’d originally met on MySpace. It was the beginning of his flight.
The first line of Lurie’s unpublished memoir is “Worcester, Massachusetts, has a dome over it, and God isn’t allowed in.” Born in Minneapolis in 1952, he grew up in Worcester, but was always headed out. In first grade, when he was assigned a composition about what he was grateful for, he wrote, “I am grateful for my skeleton, my brain, and the sun.”
Lurie’s parents, who met—depending on which of their children you ask—at a charades game or at a Communist Party meeting in Sherwood Forest, were the modern sort who went by Theda and David. (Lurie rebelled by calling them Mom and Dad.) After his beloved father died of emphysema, during his junior year in high school, Lurie colored in the circles on his S.A.T. and devoted himself to music. He’d play the sax until his lips bled, fasting all the while: “I was really trying to pass over to the other side.”
By 1978, Lurie had settled in Manhattan. He paid fifty-five dollars a month for an apartment on East Third Street and lived off Supplemental Security Income for a supposed psychological disability. (In a trial run for celebrity, he claimed to hear voices calling his name.) Lurie’s friend Rebecca Wright, who lived upstairs from him, said, “The block was a river of men with knives in their teeth, a crack corral visited by all the drag queens from uptown, and in the middle of it John was taking baths in the tub in his kitchen and practicing his saxophone in his boxer shorts, slippers on his delicate musician’s feet.”
In his memoir, Lurie writes of the East Village scene, “We were so sure of ourselves, we never doubted anything. We were powerful, smart, energetic, confident, egocentric, astoundingly naïve. Nothing outside of our fourteen-block radius mattered.” In 1979, Lurie organized the Lounge Lizards, a five-piece band (it later grew to nine musicians) that played Danceteria and C.B.G.B., headlining the no-wave scene that followed punk. Lurie’s friend Lisa Rosen, a downtown “It” girl, remembers seeing him that year “and thinking, God, he’s really made it. He was carrying dry cleaning—he’d made enough money to dry-clean one of his suits.” The Lounge Lizards wore thrift-store suits to satirize the iconography of jazz, but soon Lurie was writing complex original music, and the band’s signature became a brassy, exuberant, borderline-annoying pulse of sound. Between songs, Lurie kept up an engaging, absurdist patter: “Just south of Madagascar there’s a small, tiny little island where the people are made out of rubber.” Onstage, he radiated a restless happiness. Weston, the drummer, said, “John used to walk around and shout, ‘Play, play, play, play!’ It just flowed out like water.” The concerts didn’t end so much as wind down, like a great party.
Yet Lurie’s former office manager Sara Rychtarik observed that “with John, the doing of the art is a flow, but there’s an obsessive perfectionism about its presentation.” Stephen Torton, a friend of Lurie’s who toured with the band, says, “All over the world there would be girls outside screaming under the balcony, and inside John would be fretting over some jazz arrangement, moaning to himself. That moan was always there, even before there was a real reason for it.”
Growing up on Army bases all over, John Perry never lacked for models of discipline. He told me that his father, Richard, a lieutenant colonel in military intelligence, made Pat Conroy’s harsh Army-officer father in his novel “The Great Santini” “look like a punk.” His Korean mother, In-Ja, was warmer but even more determined; she regularly reminded Perry to “work like an ant.”
After graduating from the University of Maryland, in 1988, he moved to Manhattan and attended the Parsons School of Design. Having read that van Gogh had set himself a goal of single-mindedly drawing the figure for a year, Perry focussed so intensely on his drawing that he didn’t go out at night for two years. “I wanted to do van Gogh one up,” Perry told me. “I’d look at Velázquez and Corot and think, If I work hard, I can do that. I thought hard work would be enough.”
But, after receiving his M.F.A., in 1992, Perry emerged into a world of artists who favored vision and spontaneity over skill, and who followed Andy Warhol’s model, in which a life style, a multifarious self-presentation, can outweigh actual works. Lurie would try to convince the younger artist to loosen up. “Perry’s technique was so much better than mine, but I was always telling him, ‘Just try to put in a bit of weirdness.’ He’s trying so hard not to be seen as crazy, his paintings look like the work of a skilled accountant.” Perry said, “John saw a beautiful nude I’d painted and said, ‘Put a squiggle of red in there, and you’ll make a million bucks.’ ”
The struggle between them showcased their contrasting temperaments. Perry persistently aimed at verisimilitude: This is what a threat feels like. Saying that he’s never been as angry as he was during the first few weeks after the shoot, Perry acknowledges that if he had encountered Lurie then he might have slapped him. But he says that he never intended to do more than that, and was simply trying to terrify Lurie into empathy. As he put it in an e-mail to a friend of his and Lurie’s, “I decided then to embark on a course of using the demons of his own mind coupled with his lack of character to share with him the fear and frustration he had dispensed upon me.”
When Lurie went to Grenada, Perry, who says he figured out from the accent on the routing message on Lurie’s cell-phone voice mail that he was in the Caribbean, texted him to ask which hotel he was in. That same day, Lurie says—his fifty-sixth birthday, December 14th—Perry called and said, “When I find you, I will show you how I feel about you in the deepest way imaginable. I can wait longer than you. It will come when you least expect it.” (Perry says that he sent the message—that he hoped they could meet so “I might intimately express my deepest feelings towards you”—only by text.)
Both men were avowedly heterosexual, but Lurie felt that Perry’s behavior, and particularly this latest threat, suggested a rebuffed lover. It brought back to his mind the time that Perry had walked in while he was taking a bath and remarked, “You’ve got a beautiful penis.” Perry denies any intent to imply that he would punish Lurie sexually, saying, “I knew that keeping it deliberately vague would infuriate him.” He adds, “I’m sure I might have said, ‘You’ve got a good-looking cock there, my friend,’ but I wouldn’t have used the word ‘beautiful’ about a friend’s penis.”
That December, Perry called several times, using a Web site that replaced his cell-phone number with a fake one, hoping to get Lurie to pick up. And he used another Web site’s soundboard audio of Michael Jackson’s voice, culled from songs and interviews, to prank-call Lurie. The conversation went like this:
From Grenada, Lurie sent a Facebook message to Perry’s brother, telling him what was going on and saying, “I think [John] is in deep trouble. . . . I am certainly not asking you to do anything against your brother but to help him. Or to suggest to me how I should proceed.” Lurie simply wanted guidance, but Perry took the message as a strike against his own vulnerability: his anxiety about his privacy and his reputation. Lurie’s friend and former sound engineer Patrick Dillett said, “The two Johns know each other so well, their emotional strengths and weaknesses, that it’s like ‘Spy vs. Spy’ ”—the Mad cartoon about equally matched belligerents. “It’s almost like fighting with yourself.”
The Lounge Lizards recorded nine albums and played in Europe and Japan to packed houses. In the mid-nineties, they made thirty-five thousand dollars a week. But their albums usually sold only about fifty thousand copies. Lurie’s younger brother, Evan, who played piano and organ in the band, and who now writes the music for “The Backyardigans,” said, “Did John want to be really famous? I suspect some part of him did, and does. But—and I don’t think John ever understood this—the Lounge Lizards’ music was never going to be on the radio. It’s too cacophonous, too demanding, too ethereal, too . . . a hundred things. But, because it was so heartfelt, John could never understand why everyone wouldn’t immediately embrace it.”
Lurie believed that largeness of spirit should be the measure of an artist’s achievement, and so he grew disenchanted with many of his East Village compatriots. In the late seventies, he had let the graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat sleep on his floor, and the two of them painted together. “John told me he thought Jean-Michel was his only equal—as a human being, artist, charismatic womanizer, whatever,” Stephen Torton recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, you’re the only two people who think like that.’ ” (Lurie says that it was Torton who made the comparison.) Lurie suggested that he and Basquiat stage a boxing match as a “happening,” with posters of the two artists putting up their dukes in Everlast shorts. Then Basquiat went and posed for the Everlast-shorts photograph alongside Andy Warhol. When Basquiat became an art-world darling, Torton took a job as his assistant. “One day,” Torton said, “me and Jean-Michel were painting and John threw a rock through the window with a note on it. He wanted to discuss what was going on, this idea that we were driving around in limousines and making fun of him. John always wants to work through things, but Jean-Michel just stared at him.” Lurie says that the rock was a rubber ball, and that the window was open, but adds, “I gotta admit, Jean-Michel was stronger than me in spirit. He went from being this kid, this younger brother who followed me around, to Idi Amin. He had that thing—he was someone to be reckoned with.”
Lurie’s relationship with Jim Jarmusch was equally fraught. The germ of “Stranger Than Paradise,” a black-and-white shaggy-dog story that won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1984, was Lurie’s idea about a New York gambler (the role he played) whose Hungarian cousin comes to town. Lurie felt that Jarmusch never gave him enough credit: “When ‘Stranger’ came out, I became this guy Jim discovered, this dumb Kiefer Sutherland guy, and that was the vessel people saw my music coming out of. I hated it.” He burned his trademark fedora, which people had started to recognize from the film.
Jarmusch told me, “My life without John in it would have been a big hole. But John has a tendency to push people away from him when they get close—he’s very demanding of attention, but on his terms.”
In Palm Springs one night, after returning home, Lurie checked the alarm system, then flopped on his couch and announced, “The people who made it from the eighties had nothing to sell out in the first place. Jim Jarmusch, David Byrne, Keith Haring—all the bad ones got ahead, all the apple-for-the-teacher lightweights. The ones who are really great have a sense of madness and can’t hold it together.” Basquiat, for instance, died of a heroin overdose, in 1988. “Of the real artists from then, I’m the only one who is still alive and has his own liver.”
In early January, 2009, Lurie was staying at a noisy Residence Inn in Plainview, Long Island, in order to be near an ozone doctor yet away from Perry. This quickly came to seem like a poor compromise, so he flew to Los Angeles to stay with Flea. Lurie reunited with Jill Goodwin, who’d moved to the city, and in late February he and Nesrin Wolf moved to Flea’s house in Big Sur to paint. Flea told me, “I just wanted John to be in a beautiful place, and free of everything that binds him.” The day Lurie arrived, Perry—who had been silent for two months—began calling and leaving messages. Perry says that he’d hang up at the beep, but Lurie heard tapping sounds and one sequence that sounded like someone walking on a pebble-strewn driveway. Flea’s house had a pebble-strewn driveway. Lurie said, “I realized, Fuck, he knew I was going to come here, we’d talked about painting together at Flea’s house. How do I know he’s not in the woods outside?”
Lurie feared that Perry could track his every movement, not only because Perry had set up his computer and might have planted spyware in it (in anticipation of their breach) but because Perry had grown up among spies. So he hired a New York-based private detective to determine whether Perry was still in the city—then forbade the detective, whose surveillance of Perry’s apartment produced no results, to simply call him up for an interview, because he didn’t want to agitate him further. But Lurie’s conversations about Perry with their mutual friends, which quickly got back to Perry, were doing just that.
One April evening at sunset, after Lurie received a “Private Caller” hangup, which he took to be Perry, he answered the phone and said, “Do you have the balls to say anything? You pathetic loser.” There was silence, and Lurie hung up. The phone rang again, and Lurie, with Wolf listening in, answered and said, “I know you’re there—if this problem isn’t resolved, I’m going to send all our e-mails to everyone we know, including your parents, your brother, and Steve Nash”—the N.B.A. star, whom Perry had befriended after filming him for an Internet sneaker campaign. Silence, and Lurie hung up again.
The phone rang and Perry said, “Involve anyone you want.”
Lurie asked, “Why are you doing this?”
Perry said, “If you can tell me why I’m doing this, I’ll stop.” Perry says that he meant If you can show me that you understand your part in provoking this campaign, I’ll stop, but Lurie interprets the remark differently, as If you can help me to understand myself, I’ll stop.
Lurie said, “You’re doing this because I won’t be your friend anymore.” Lurie and Wolf say that he added, “You must feel so ugly, if doing this makes you feel better,” and that Perry replied, “You have no idea.” (Perry says that he doesn’t remember this final exchange.)
Lurie told me, “I totally dominated him in that conversation—I was talking to him like I was his father.” And Perry acknowledged, “The threat to call Steve Nash bothered me, because Steve doesn’t know me well enough not to be swayed by how persuasive John can be.” He told me that that day marked his last effort to harass Lurie.
In June, Lurie and Wolf moved on to the village of Gurece, in Turkey. Wolf wanted to visit her home country, and Lurie felt safe there, far from anywhere. After a productive summer, Lurie came back to his New York apartment in September for a show of his paintings. At the opening, he wore a bandage on his right index finger—a few nights earlier, disturbed by again being in the same city as Perry, and upset that a mutual friend seemed to be taking Perry’s part, he’d got drunk, reached down for his cell phone, and cut his finger open on the machete under his bed.
One afternoon in Palm Springs, Lurie decided to visit Joshua Tree National Park. He wasn’t feeling well, so I drove. As we waited in a bottleneck to get on the 10 freeway, he stared at a bed abandoned in the desert scrub. “What the fuck are we doing here?” he asked Nesrin Wolf.
“Yes,” Wolf said. “We need not to be in so much quiet, with just old people.”
“Next time, by the water,” Lurie said. “Maybe South Carolina.”
“South Carolina,” Wolf repeated, musingly. “That’s in the East, right?”
Lurie laughed, finding himself plunged into an episode of “Fishing with John.” “I’ve already disappeared,” he said. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t just say I’m dead, and see what happens to the value of the paintings.”
Though Perry insists that his last attempts to jangle Lurie were the calls of April, 2009, Lurie sees a continuing pattern of alarming events. In December, there was a call to his unlisted cell phone from a number identical to one Perry had used, only with two digits, a 4 and a 7, transposed; when Lurie picked up he heard a howling sound, as if the caller were trying to imitate an airplane. And, this March, Lurie’s personal and business e-mail accounts and Facebook page were hacked into, as was Wolf’s e-mail account, and many of their old e-mails were erased. While Lurie and Wolf were staring at his Facebook page, trying to figure out what was going on, his status update changed in front of their eyes to “Pussy.”
Lurie was determined to bring matters to a head. He considered a Kafkaesque approach: he’d just sit silently in an armchair in front of Perry’s building. Or the “Taxi Driver” scenario: “Telling the police what I’ve tried to do to stop this, then going to Perry’s house with a gun and killing him. I’d have my life back in five years, after I got out.”
In the end, in December, Lurie paid a stiff twenty-one-thousand-dollar retainer to Bill Stanton, an on-air “safety-and-security expert” for “Good Morning America,” so that Stanton would befriend Perry and then somehow gaslight him into certifiable insanity. (Stanton, who agreed to discuss the case only with his client’s approval, says that he was hired to assess whether Perry posed a danger to Lurie, and then to advise on possible defensive measures.) The investigator checked Perry’s priors and found no record. (N.Y.P.D. record-keeping can be somewhat haphazard.) Then, Stanton told me, “I went to some socio-behavioralist psychologists, and some retired analysts in the alphabetic agencies”—meaning the C.I.A.—“and gave them the details on Perry: male, white, artist, forty-four, never been arrested, no record I could find of violence, eking out a living, good-looking Eurasian type in a one-bedroom walkup, no cauliflower ears. And they said, ‘This is not the profile of a Mark David Chapman, it’s just not.’ ”
Perry had his first solo show in late December, at a SoHo gallery. Stanton dropped by and struck up a conversation with him, pretending to be a television producer named Bill Alexander. He said that he was interested in making a reality show in which Perry would draw real New Yorkers, and Perry said, “We can save a lot of time and effort—I already shot a pilot for a drawing-instruction show.”
Lurie expected that Stanton would get Perry excited about the putative show, then say that he’d heard about the Lurie mess and insist that it be resolved before they went forward. But Stanton never followed through with Perry—or with Lurie, either, having apparently decided that his work was done. Stanton told me, “Yes, it might have originally gotten violent if Perry and Lurie had tangled on the street. But there’s a world of difference between that and the idea that this guy could hack into NORAD, or that he’s hiring ex-Navy SEALs to fly across the country and do wet work.” Irked by Lurie’s increasingly recriminatory e-mails—Perry’s “work as a stalker is better than the person that I hired to stop him,” Lurie wrote—Stanton finally retorted, “You, sir, are your greatest enemy.”
That Lurie’s requests for help from hired advisers and even from friends kept boomeranging only stimulated his suspicion that human beings sort of suck. He’d been so generous with his friends, loaning them money, even buying them houses—where were they now? Lurie said, “There were sixty people at my fiftieth-birthday party”—in 2002—“and only five are still in my life. It was all too much for my friends; they started to lose interest. It was like Darfur.” A number of Lurie’s friends now felt that Perry was his default topic, and paranoia his default mode. Patrick Dillett told me, “It had reached the point that if I said I saw John Perry in an ‘I Love John Lurie’ T-shirt John would have said, ‘That’s because he wants to kill me.’ ”
In January, when Lurie learned that Perry’s work was going to appear in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, he got drunk and wrote an update on his Facebook page: “This psychopath has driven me from my home, and now he’s having a group show in Brooklyn. What happened to civilization?” Wolf made him delete it. But the abortive outburst had inspired a Turkish fan of Lurie’s—with his subsequent endorsement—to start a “Support for John Lurie” Facebook page, which declared that “John Lurie had to leave his home in New York because a friend of his went insane.” Soon, more than two thousand people were fans of the page, and many posted messages of love and concern; the actress and eighties club denizen Ann Magnuson wrote, “Sending John major hugs from La La Land. Let me know how I can help!” Perry joined the fray, using the pseudonym Ron Beal, to defend his reputation. “Although [Perry] has no fame and less money,” he wrote, “he has the love and admiration of REAL cats in New York who know him as a stand-up person.”
Believing that Perry sounded reasonable, Jill Goodwin sent him a Facebook message telling him that Lurie was despondent and drinking too much. “Please, as someone who once cared about John, realize that he needs help . . . for someone who is already feeling emasculated by a crazy illness, it has just been too much for him. He has been living in constant fear; sleeping with weapons, never able to relax.”
When Perry turned from his computer, Laksmi Hedemark says, “he was white.” He e-mailed Lurie that evening, writing that he really didn’t want any harm to befall his old friend and—responding somewhat ambiguously to Goodwin’s concerns—added, “As sick as you are . . . you probably would have taken a beating, even, just to prove [you weren’t a coward].” He also acknowledged that his behavior in the weeks following the video shoot “was not only wrong but perhaps disproportionate to the events that precipitated it,” and declared, “As much as I’ve loved any friend, I loved you, and still do. I think I had forgotten that until I saw you in my mind’s eye, in the state Jill described.”
Lurie wrote back, saying that he would love to accept the olive branch, but “unfortunately, that would make me an idiot.” He knew that Perry had heard previous accounts of the effect of his campaign on Lurie, and believed the apology was motivated less by solicitude than by Perry’s concern about the Facebook page. He went on, “YOU MADE EVERY EFFORT TO CONVINCE ME THAT YOU WERE INSANE AND DANGEROUS,” and listed, at considerable length, all of Perry’s harassments. “Where do you learn this stuff? Stalkers’ Monthly?” He concluded, “I FORGIVE YOU. But do not ask me to believe you.”
After a further e-mail exchange, Perry observed, “YOU are the one obsessed. YOU are stalking ME.” He told me he wasn’t surprised by Lurie’s response: “John knows how tenacious and committed I can be, and I knew his respect for me would increase his fear. I also knew, given John’s ego, that his imagination would do the rest. He’d buy into the idea that I was stalking him because he sees himself as a celebrity, and to have a stalker is to say, ‘I’m in the highest echelon of notable people.’ ”
Neither man wants to apologize unilaterally—or, really, at all. Perry told me, “I regret the whole thing, it was silly and cruel.” But, he added, “I’d like John to be able to say, ‘John, you scared the fuck out of me, you’re a heartless, coldhearted motherfucker—but, at the same time, I shouldn’t have said I’d call the cops, I shouldn’t have called all your friends, I should have answered the phone when you needed me.’ ”
Lurie told me that he’d done nothing wrong and said, “I could forgive John Perry if he’s just insane. But if he were enjoying this? That would be unacceptable, and I’d have to destroy him.” When his symptoms recede, he feels eager to resolve the maddening anxieties and ambiguities once and for all, and often says to himself, “God, I hope he comes now!”
I drove Lurie back from Joshua Tree late in the afternoon. He slumped in the front seat, saying that his head was roaring. As the sun slipped behind the Little San Bernardino Mountains, Lurie said, “Illness has a beautiful way of bestowing a glow on you. You notice the way the light hits the top of the trees.” Then he fell silent for thirty miles. As we passed the outskirts of Indio—a scatter of isolated houses braced against the darkness—he said, “How do these people end up here? Do they all have stalkers?”
The dream of artists—which is simply the dream of friends and lovers, magnified—is to plant themselves in other people’s heads. By that standard, John Perry has created a masterpiece. Last summer, Lurie wrote a friend that Perry “has been in every facet of my consciousness for months. . . . Every dream, every brush stroke. He has infected my mind.”
Perry, too, continues to have Lurie on the brain. One night not long ago, he e-mailed me to say, “It is 3:24 A.M., and I thought I should let you know immediately that I just dialed John’s number from my phone book by accident. I heard the voice on the machine and hung up.” When I inquired how this accident had occurred, Perry said that he had been looking up Lurie’s home number on his cell phone in preparation for calling Time Warner Cable. He was planning to again pretend to be Lurie to try to determine for exactly how many minutes Lurie had watched the Jones-Calzaghe fight, and thereby to ascertain, once and for all, maybe, whether Lurie really had been sick.
The protracted duet has become a kind of living performance piece, but neither man is able to see it as art: Perry because he views himself solely as a painter, and Lurie because he never before associated art with a fear of death. Curiously, though, the struggle seems to have inspired them both; artists sometimes require an enemy. Perry sold two pieces at his December show, one for nine thousand dollars, and just had a show of nudes at a downtown boutique. When he looked at the footage from “The Drawing Show” recently, he thought it could actually make a pilot. And, now that his life has begun to improve, Perry said, Lurie should feel emboldened to come home: “I wouldn’t shove him down at this point—if only not to give him the satisfaction of being right.” He laughed, then added wistfully, “Anyway, I can’t kill him over the phone—he should call me.”
Lurie recently had successful shows in Japan and Los Angeles. He told me, “It’s strange, but being ready to fight every day—I think it’s made me younger. I look better. If something this formidable hadn’t happened, I would never have left my apartment. But I got away, I started painting again, I saw the whales in Big Sur. . . . On the other hand, the whole thing has left me really confused about the nature of life. I guess I expected there to be more sanity in the world.”
He left Palm Springs in May, but he hasn’t decided where to settle next. Thailand seems interesting, or Cuba. He thought about driving to Las Vegas and entering the World Series of Poker, relishing the idea that he would emerge from hiding on national television. After not playing his saxophones since 2001, Lurie recently had them repaired, and on good days he thinks about coming home and working his lip back into shape. “Putting together another band and touring—ennh,” he said. “Too much stress, and I don’t have the armor anymore to deal with people. I’d probably just play on the street. There’s a spot on Astor Place, near where the cube is, between Broadway and Lafayette—a saxophone sounds incredible there at about six o’clock.” ♦
