Wild Years (20 page)

The name that Waits had really wanted to give his daughter was Wilder. It seemed to suit a daydream image he had of her as an adult so perfectly: she'd be flying down Freeway 405 in a big old white convertible, her red hair flying in the wind, as old-time soul tunes came pumping out of the car radio.
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No frail ballerina types for Tom Waits. His baby would grow up to be a hell-raiser, a heartbreaker, a beauty with a brain and the guts to use it, a thorn in the side of the establishment. In short, a woman just like Kathleen.

Fatherhood gave Waits a whole new appreciation of the advantages that come with being just another face in the crowd. His anonymity would surely enhance Kellesimone's comfort and safety, and it also afforded him the luxury (and the artistic necessity) of observing the world around him in relative peace. “I like to go to places where I can be anonymous and just sit,” he said to Hoskyns. “That's what writers want — to be invisible. Sometimes when your face gets recognizable, then there are places that you
can't go. So I think you have to retain a certain amount of that for the sake of the intrinsic value of what it is that you do so you can go places, be a fly on the wall.”
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Waits was, in fact, in an ideal position: he could run to the supermarket to pick up diapers for Kellesimone without being recognized and waylaid; but his professional reputation was such that he continued to be offered stimulating projects. Of course Waits was occasionally recognized on the street, but it never became overwhelming.

Again, the release of a new album had little effect on the situation. The reviews for
Swordfishtrombones
were phenomenal, the sales were sluggish (in the U.S., that is — the album was a hit in Europe), and Waits's right to privacy remained uncompromised. Waits, who had never longed to see his face on a lunch box or a kung fu–grip action figure, could live with it.

Due to the quality of his music and film credentials, Waits was able to recruit a Hollywood heavyweight to direct his second music video. Haskell Wexler was the award-winning cinematographer of
American Graffiti, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
and many others. He had also won raves for his 1969 directing debut, a docudrama about a jaded T.V. newsman called
Medium Cool
. Turning his talented gaze on Tom Waits, Wexler translated the street-band feel of “In the Neighborhood” into a series of visual images by casting Waits as the leader of a motley group of mummers. The medium of the music video was exploding at this point thanks to an up-start cable channel called
MTV
, Music Television, which had been on the air for less than a year. But because the video for “In the Neighborhood” didn't conform to the rapidly set standard — Duran Duran's “Hungry like the Wolf,” Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean,” and David Bowie's “Let's Dance” were the station's current choice clips — Wexler's little film received next to no attention.

At about this time, Rickie Lee Jones recorded one of Waits's early un-released songs, “Rainbow Sleeves.” Her emotional delivery on the cut was heartbreaking, and it enriched her 1983
EP
Girl at Her Volcano
. The song was also included on the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's film
The King of Comedy
. In 1981, she had released the album
Pirates
— the follow-up to her self-titled debut — and its first single was “A Lucky Guy,” the confession of a woman who is holding on to a man who, “When he talks about me / He don't look this way.” The song was loosely based on her relationship with Waits. Rickie Lee could sing eloquently about the pain of their separation, even though she was reluctant to talk about it.

On the acting front, things were more straightforward for Waits. The work was coming in; he could make his contribution and go home at the
end of the day. For the most part, this was courtesy of Francis Ford Coppola. After
One from the Heart
crashed on take off, Coppola had decided to do a couple of small, intimate films based on the teen novels of S. E. Hinton. He offered Waits small parts in the two films, both of which were released in 1983. The first was
The Outsiders,
a sentimental drama about gang life set in the fifties, which turned out to be a vehicle for introducing members of the so-called Hollywood Brat Pack, and a future super star or two, to the world. The cast included Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio, C. Thomas Howell, Leif Garrett, Diane Lane, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, and Tom Cruise. Into this dynamic ensemble Coppola inserted Tom, of whom he'd grown very fond. He referred to him as “a prince of melancholia” and gave him the cameo role of Buck Merrill. When the time came to cast
Rumble Fish,
Coppola rewarded Tom with a bigger role. The director's second run at bringing a Hinton novel to the screen presented a darker vision of teen rebellion than the tragic but fundamentally uplifting
Outsiders
.
Rumble Fish
also starred Dillon and Lane; Mickey Rourke and Dennis Hopper added their eccentric energies to the mix; and Tom Waits turned in a credible performance as Benny, the local pool-hall owner.

The following year, 1984, Waits not only did a cameo in the well-received Robert Duvall vehicle
The Stone Boy,
but he was also available to help Coppola. The director was returning to more ambitious, risky, big-budget filmmaking with
The Cotton Club,
a tale of crime and passion set during the Roaring Twenties at Harlem's most famous hot spot. Richard Gere, Diane Lane, James Remar, Gregory Hines, and Lonette McKee headed the cast, and Tom Waits backed them up as Herman Stark, the club's manager. Waits had to admit that the roles he was getting weren't exactly straining his acting muscles — no one, it seemed, was interested in having him play an emergency-room doctor or a hardened defense attorney or a man of the cloth. Still, he had some fun with Stark, an elegant character who sports a tux, smokes a fat stogie, and constantly exudes a cold menace.
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The switch from music to acting “was like going from bootlegging to watch repair,” Waits told
Rolling Stone
's David Sheff. “
Rumble Fish
was like a fractured teenage opium dream. Francis had all the actors out in the morning, on a vacant lot, doing tai chi chuan. Then there was
The Outsiders
. I had one line: ‘What is it you boys want?' I still have it down if they need me to go back and recreate the scene for any reason. For
The Cotton Club,
I was in a tuxedo for like two and a half months.”
²⁰

The Cotton Club
took longer to complete than anyone expected, and
Tom had begun to feel the itch to create something new. He and Kathleen had hatched the idea of staging a musical, starring Tom, based on the character of Frank from “Frank's Wild Years,” and they started building on it. The prospect of collaborating on such a project excited them both. The play would have a long gestation, but finally, after many rewrites and idea shifts, it opened in Chicago in 1986.

In order to give their theatrical piece a fighting chance, Tom and Kathleen realized that they'd have to make a couple of sacrifices. The first was giving up the opportunity to tour with
Swordfishtrombones
. The second was giving up their home. The heart of American theater beats in New York City, not Los Angeles, so Tom, Kathleen, and Kellesimone packed up and relocated to the Big Apple.

Tom was ready to give New York another chance, even though he considered it “a hard city.” He told Hoskyns, “You have to be on your toes. A cab driver actually said to me, ‘I love New York.' He said, ‘If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, just like Frank said.' I just fell out.” Soon, however, Tom was having his usual odd, funny, scary encounters with the city's inhabitants — a sure sign that he was settling in. A woman approached him at a newsstand and said, “‘Excuse me, sir, is this the place where the clocks are?' And I said, ‘This is the place where the clocks are.' She asked me who I was. I said, ‘Father Time.' She said, ‘Dad!' and she opened her arms.”
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Continuing in this vein, Waits talked about midtown gridlock — an incomprehensible phenomenon to the average out-of-towner — and opined, “It's hard to live with dignity because it's not a very civilized place. You have to be a little off center; if you don't bend with it, it will snap you because [the city] itself is off. It's not round and it's going around and every time it comes around it's in a different place. So if you try to walk a straight line it'll knock you over. But then you get a Romanian cab driver who is playing Romanian music full blast in his cab. And there's a picture of Malcolm X on the dashboard and he's wearing a Budweiser hat and he has different shoes on — a tennis shoe and an Oxford . . . and he tells you about a club in Queens. It's insane. It's thrilling, addicting . . . It requires a special training.”

The Waits family needed a home, a refuge from the turmoil of city life, so Tom and Kathleen went hunting. They found a burned-out loft off West 14th Street in Little Spain, not far from Union Square. The place was centrally located, within a block of the Babalu Bar and Grill, the Salvation Army Diner, and Courmey's Restaurant (which Tom considered amazingly
clean for New York). Furnishing their new digs was a task Tom attacked with the same fervor he'd demonstrated when searching out new kinds of musical instruments. He claimed to have picked up everything that finally went into the loft's decor on the streets — New York, he insisted, was truly wonderful.
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Throughout the resettlement process, music was never far from his thoughts. “There's construction sounds here all the time,” he explained to Hoskyns. “So I started taping a lot of stuff. How that will integrate into what I'm doing, I'm not certain. But I started taping the sounds of machinery a lot and I play it back at night, 'cause you miss it, you know. When it gets quiet and you're relaxed . . . so I play it back at full volume so I can re-experience the sounds of the day. There's, like, a pile driver outside of my window. You know what a pile driver is? It's all what you get used to.”

New York's intellectual and artistic currents had Waits enthralled. His best creative tool had long been his vocabulary, and the city served up a daily buffet of words. Everywhere he went, words, phrases, and ideas — spoken, yelled, written, flashing in neon — came at him. In bars, in restaurants, and in SoHo galleries, on piers at the waterfront. Where slaughterhouses rubbed shoulders with modeling agencies, where movie houses gave way to sex-paraphernalia shops, where sweatshops alternated with gyms and diners and cavernous antique/junk marts. “It's all the contrasts,” he said to Elliott Murphy. “There are distinctive lines of demarcation, but for the most part, it's like an aquarium. It's almost overwhelming. Words are everywhere. All you have to do is look out the window and there's a thousand words.”
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Instinctively, Waits went on soaking it up and channeling it into his art. He remarked that “Musically, the density is interesting. The types of things you hear while you're here . . . if you remember them and put them together it's real international — if you're listening. I usually enjoy things that I misinterpret. When you hear music through a wall. You've missed a couple of beats and the words aren't what they are but you hear them and you think that's what it is. That happens a lot in New York cause you're hearing everything filtered through things — it's like being on a party line. You have to have a lot of money to live here.”
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When asked if he was happy in Manhattan, Waits replied, “I don't know. It's such a transient thing anyway . . . happy. I [could] go out in the street and drop my trousers and start singing ‘Fly Me to the Moon' and no one would notice. I can shave my head, put on a dress, and pee in the beer
glass . . . I was looking for a place that repairs chairs, an upholstery place . . . There was a place that sold nothing but buttons — just buttons, millions of buttons of all sizes. Next to that was a place for sewing machine repair and then I saw a mountain of nothing but silverware in the window — a mountain of silverware. It's not logical. But all of that can be stimulating if you can allow it.” Waits also told David Letterman that living in New York was like being aboard a sinking ship while the ocean is on fire.
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In September 1985, Tom and Kathleen had their second child, a son. Tom had his heart set on naming the kid Senator Waits, figuring he'd have a leg up if he ever decided to go into politics. Kathleen, her husband alleged, vetoed the idea — she wanted to name her baby boy Representative Waits. In order to avert a war between the Houses, the two reached a compromise: Casey Xavier Waits.
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One night Tom went to a party held in honor of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, toast of the SoHo art scene. Basquiat, a Brooklyn kid who'd been discovered applying graffiti to various Manhattan surfaces, was the type of do-it-yourself artist Waits could respect. His work was passionate and original, but Basquiat's rise was tragically meteoric. He would die of a drug overdose at twenty-seven. (In 1996, artist Julian Schnabel made
Basquiat,
a film about the painter starring Jeffrey Wright, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, and David Bowie; in it, Waits's song “Tom Traubert's Blues” plays a prominent role.)

At that party for Basquiat, which was held in a SoHo bar, Waits met independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Jarmusch had recently released his first film,
Stranger than Paradise,
and it had become an art-house phenomenon. He was a big fan of
Swordfishtrombones,
so he went over to introduce himself to Waits. They connected immediately, and before the night was over, they'd hit three other watering holes together. Jarmusch, a maverick in his own right, was drawn to Waits's quirky individualism. He recalls visiting Waits in his 14th Street loft; there he witnessed Kellesimone painting pictures on the walls while Tom painted pinstripes onto a suit.
²⁷
It was inevitable that Jarmusch and Waits become friends and collaborators.