Folkert arranges to meet Johnny in five minutes outside the hotel, and leaves.
“O.K.,” says Johnny, once he’s out of sight. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” We use the back stairs.
Johnny Depp says he always had an idea he was going to be something different. Not a movie star—”in Florida that just didn’t exist.” But guitar heroes did. There was one at his high school, a guy named John Rock. “You couldn’t get a cooler name in the ’70s than that.” So Johnny decided to become a famous guitar player. For the girls. And to make a place in his world. “You’ve got to have some kind of identity,” he says. “We weren’t jocks, we weren’t rednecks—we were probably considered burnouts, although we weren’t fully burnouts. So we decided to be rock stars instead.”
A few weeks later Johnny Depp changed his mind. He went to see the administration and said he wanted to come back. They didn’t think it was a good idea. So Johnny worked for awhile printing T-shirts, then at a garage, first pumping gas then aligning wheels and stuff. It was around this time he read Catcher in the Rye and On the Road, with the usual consequences.
It’s over. The Germans in the anteroom tell him that a man in a strange flag-festooned leather jacket had been trying to find him, but has gone. Johnny picks up his backpack and Butthole Surfers tape in his room and leaves for the airport. We arrange to meet in New York in a few days. “Call me at the hotel,” he says. “Mr. Stench.”
No. I’d go off . . . on . . . off. I still catch myself doing that sometimes.
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