Straight Life

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Straight Life Page 6

by Art Pepper; Laurie Pepper


  We came back with our little certificate and there was nothing the families could do but okay it. My father was furious because he wanted to have us married in the house with my grandmother there. I was his only son and he wanted to do it right. We had another ceremony to satisfy him, and then we rented an apartment down by Adams above Fiqueroa.

  Before we went to Tijuana we'd work each other into such a state it was unbelievable. She kept asking me, telling me she wanted me to do it, and once I tried, but it was a horrible, horrible scene, and then she started bleeding. So after we got married, it was agony trying to have intercourse without hurting her, but finally I got through, and it was perfect from then on. As I look back I see that all we had was sex, that beauty, and we made love continuously. I remember once we made love eleven times in one day and I came all those times.

  For a while, before we got the apartment, we stayed with my grandmother. We'd wait until she left the house and the minute she was gone we'd take our clothes off and start making love. We'd do it in the front room so we could look out the window and watch for her. When she was home we weren't able to contain ourselves, so we'd go out to the old garage in the back, which was filled with stuff; there was a place at the top where there were two mattresses on the beams we could climb up onto. Patti would wear a cotton housedress with nothing on underneath, and we'd go make love by the hour. Sometimes my grandmother would come calling us and we'd stop and hold on to each other and not breathe and be giggling up there. I'd finally found someone who loved me.

  3

  The Avenue

  1940-1944

  WHEN I WAS at San Pedro High, because I was a musician and played for the dances, I began to get popular. All the chicks dug me and would vie for me, smile at me, and flirt with me. The guys came around, too, and listened to me play, and they wanted me to hang out with them. And one day this guy Chris came to me, him and a couple of other guys, and they wanted me to join the club they belonged to. It was an honor.

  In San Pedro at this time there were a lot of different gangs. Chris had a gang called the Cobras. I thought I might be happier if I was with other people more and I also wanted to join because I figured it would impress my dad: the Cobras had a reputation. I joined and got a jacket with a cobra on the back.

  We used to go to the Torrance Civic Auditorium to the dances, and Chris, who was the biggest guy in our group, would find the biggest guy on the floor, who was a member of some other gang, wait until the guy was dancing, and then go up to him and tap him on the shoulder to cut in on his date. The guy would say, "Hey, there's no cutting in here! Get lost!" Chris would just hit him on the shoulder again, grab him, turn him around, and Sunday him, you know, punch him. And when he'd hit a guy, he was so good that no matter how big they were they'd go down. The guy would go down, and everybody would get all excited, and Chris would tell him, "We're the Cobras. We'll meet you at so-and-so."

  There was a street where some city or county lines metWilmington, San Pedro, Torrance, I'm not sure. The street was right in the middle of these lines, and there was some idea that this was the safest place to fight, which was ridiculous because the police would bust you anywhere-they didn't care about lines. But this was where we'd go. It was a country type place and at night it was deserted. There was an old lot with a stand where they sold vegetables in the daytime.

  I was never afraid of a one-on-one situation boxing or fistfighting, but when you get into gangs then you have to worry if someone's got a knife or a gun or a piece of steel. We'd drive to this lot, the cars would stop, and out would jump Chris and all the guys and the guys from the other gang, and they'd meet and start fighting. I would have to get out and fight. We'd fight until one side or the other won, or, if we were losing, we'd jump in our cars and split. And afterwards, we'd go to this drive-in and eat and talk about the fight. They'd laugh and everything. That was, like, great fun. We'd strut around the school the next day. And we drank. We drank Burgermeister ale and Gilbey's gin to get the nerve to go into these things. That was the trip and it wasn't me.

  Finally, during one of these fights, some guys brought out a chain, and a couple of knives came out, and a couple of guys got cut real bad, and I started thinking, "Wow, I don't want this!" I thought, "If this is being part of society . . ." That was society for me. Now, if that was what I had to do to belong, I didn't want any part of it. So that was when I started getting with Johnny Martizia and Jimmy Henson, musicians I'd met playing at dances. They were in their early twenties, and they had other friends whose thing was playing music, and it was a good thing. I got along better with them. I withdrew from the guys in school, and the gang ranked me: they thought I thought I was better than them, that I was stuck-up, that I had a big head, and every now and then I'd get challenged by one of these guys and have to have a fistfight, but it was better than being part of that gang. I quit the Cobras and that's when I really got into the music thing.

  (Johnny Martizia) I was about eighteen. I was playing with a little dance band, high school dances, and I kept hearing all these, you know, stinking saxophone players, out of tune, honking sounds, and I went to this rehearsal, and I heard somebody warming up, playing scales and so on, and my God! I said, "What is that?" It was such a gorgeous sound. It was like a real artist, and I looked, and it was this little kid! He looked about fourteen years old. It was Art. I couldn't believe it. I said, "Who the hell are you?"

  Art and I got real friendly. He'd come over to my house. I played him some records and I played some jazz myself. Not well. He said, "How do you do that? How do you jam?" That was the word-jam. I explained about chord progressions and I said, "You make up your own melody." And boy, he got it right away. He's got great ears. He'd hear something once and he'd have it. He must have had a good teacher, too. Art knew all his scales, and that's very important.

  I had started out playing cowboy songs, "Home on the Range," things like that. Then, somehow, I happened to hear some Django Reinhardt. That was really incredible. I still have some of the records-78s. I listened to them over and over and tried to copy all his licks. I started taking down beat magazine, listening to all the big bands, and going with the other guys to hear people like Coleman Hawkins and T-Bone Walker when they were in town. We'd get friendly with them and they'd tell us, "Hey, man, we're going to go down to this after-hours place and jam, do you want to come?" Of course we'd go. We'd stay all night.

  Well, Art started going out with us, going to bars to play. We didn't even have a car; we'd walk sometimes for miles. Zoot Sims was one of the guys then. We used to call him Jackie, Jackie Sims.

  Art was a very clean-looking, Italian-looking kid, normal height, good weight, very, very healthy, good-looking. He was a very exciting kid, kinda naughty, you know, a raise-hell kinda kid. One night we went to a club to jam and all of a sudden I turn around and here's Art having an argument with an old guy. Maybe he wasn't so old; he seemed old to us. The next thing I know, Art's rolling on the floor, fighting with this guy. Art was a very energetic kid. Always jumpin' around.

  WHEN I was nine or ten I liked the big bands that I heard on the radio-Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet. After I got my clarinet, I started buying their records. It became my goal to play Artie Shaw's part on "Concerto for Clarinet." Finally, after I'd been playing for a few years, Mr. Parry bought me the sheet music. I practiced all alone and with the record, and I was finally able to play it. It was a difficult piece.

  Johnny Martizia was a guitar player; Jimmy Henson played trombone. I got together with them at their houses to play. Johnny would strum the guitar. He told me, "These are the chords to the blues, which all jazz emanates from. This is black music, from Africa, from the slave ships that came to America."

  I liked what I heard, but I didn't know what chords were. Chords are the foundation for all music, the foundation jazz players improvise on. I said, "What shall I do?" He said, "Listen to the sounds I'm making on my guitar and play what you feel." He st
rummed the blues and I played things that felt nice and seemed to fit. We played and played, and slowly I began to play sounds that made sense and didn't clash with what he was doing. I asked him if he thought that I might have the right to play jazz. He said, "You're very fortunate. You have a gift." I wanted to become the greatest player in the world. I wanted to become a jazz musician.

  I ran around with Johnny and his friends. We'd go into bars and ask if we could play. Sometimes they said yes. I was fourteen or fifteen. These guys took me down to Central Avenue, the black nightclub district, and asked if we could sit in. The people there were very encouraging.

  I played clarinet in the school band in San Pedro but when I got to Fremont High I stopped playing in school and started working more jobs. I had been playing alto saxophone since I was twelve, and now I got a job playing alto with a trio at Victor McLaglen's. I began going by myself to Central Avenue. I met a lot of musicians there. I ran into a bass player, Joe Mondragon, who said he was going with Gus Arnheim in San Diego. He asked me if I wanted to go with the band. I was still going to school but I wasn't going regular. I went to San Diego and stayed for about three months.

  Gus Arnheim was in a big ballroom down there. It was a very commercial band and I didn't fit in because there were no jazz solos to play-you just read music. It was good practice, but it got tiresome, so I left, came back, went to Central Avenue again, and ran into Dexter Gordon. He said that Lee Young was forming a band to go into the Club Alabam; they needed an alto player. I auditioned and I got the job. I think I auditioned at the colored union. They had a white union and a colored union. I had already joined the union when I lived in San Pedro.

  This was in the early '40s and things were so different from the way they are now. Central Avenue was like Harlem was a long time ago. As soon as evening came people would be out on the streets, and most of the people were black, but nobody was going around in black leather jackets with naturals hating people. It was a beautiful time. It was a festive time. The women dressed up in frills and feathers and long earrings and hats with things hanging off them, fancy dresses with slits in the skirts, and they wore black silk stockings that were rolled, and wedgie shoes. Most of the men wore big, wide-brimmed hats and zoot suits with wide collars, small cuffs, and large knees, and their coats were real long with padded shoulders. They wore flashy ties with diamond stickpins; they wore lots of jewelry; and you could smell powder and perfume everywhere. And as you walked down the street you heard music coming out of everyplace. And everybody was happy. Everybody just loved everybody else, or if they didn't, I didn't know about it. Gerald Wiggins, the piano player, Slick Jones, the drummer, Dexter Gordon, and Charlie Mingus-we would just walk out in the street and pee off the curb. It was just cool. We'd light up a joint; we had Mota, which is moist and black, and we'd smoke pot right out in front of the club.

  The dope thing hadn't evolved into what it is now, with all the police activity. I'd never heard of a narco, didn't know what the word meant. Nobody wanted to rat on anybody or plant their car with a joint or with some stuff. You didn't have to worry that the guy that asked you to go out and smoke a joint was a policeman or that the chick that wanted to take you over to her pad and ball you was trying to set you up for the cops. People just got high, and they had fun, and there were all kinds of places to go, and if you walked in with a horn everyone would shout, "Yeah! Great! Get it out of the case and blow some!" They didn't care if you played better than somebody else. Nobody was trying to cut anybody or take their job, so we'd get together and blow.

  There was no black power. I was sixteen, seventeen years old, white, innocent, and I'd wander around all over the place, at all hours of the night, all night long, and never once was accosted. I was never threatened. I was never challenged to a fight. I was never called a honkie. And I never saw any violence at all except for an occasional fight over a woman or something like that. It was a whole different trip than it got be later on.

  The club Alabam was the epitome of Central Avenue. It was right off Forty-second Street across from Ivy Anderson's Chicken Shack. There were a lot of other clubs, but the Club Alabam was really one of the old-time show-time places, a huge room with beautiful drapes and silks and sparklers and colored lights turning and flashing. The bandstand was plush and gorgeous with curtains that glistened. The waitresses were dressed in scanty costumes, and they were all smiling and wiggling and walking around, and everywhere you looked you saw teeth, people laughing, and everybody was decked out. It was a sea of opulence, big hats and white fluffy fur. And the cars out front were real long Cadillacs with little mudguards, little flappy little things, shiny things.

  The band had two altos, two trumpets, a tenor, and a rhythm section. On the show was Avery Parrish. He was the one who wrote "After Hours" and made that famous, and when he played the whole place rocked with the music. There was Wynonie Harris, a real handsome guy, light skinned with glistening eyes and the processed hair, all shiny with every hair just perfectly in place. He had a good blues voice and just carried the audience away. The walls would start shaking; the people screaming and clapping. Every now and then they'd get up and start wiggling in the aisles next to their tables. Moke and Poke were on the bill, far-out comedians. When they came on they'd do this walking step, laughing, one right behind the other, moving in perfect synchronization. After their act they'd run into their dressing room, rip off their clothes, and throw on silk robes and come back and do this walk around the audience; every now and then, when they were walking, if the audience was really good, they'd have it so their joints would flop out of their robes, flopping in time, in perfect unison, and the chicks would go, "Ahhhhh!" And we'd just be shouting in the background, playing these real down-home blues. I'd go in there and play and get so caught up in the feeling that I never had a chance to think about anything bad that might be happening to me or to worry at all. It was such an open, such a free, such a beautifully right time.

  There was a place on Vernon, right around the corner from the Club Alabam, called the Ritz Club. You went through a door into an empty storefront and walked through a curtain. You took bottles in, and they served mixes and food. The music started at two in the morning and went on all night. People would come and sit in: Jimmy Blanton, probably the greatest bass player that ever lived-he was so far ahead of any jazz musician on any instrument it was just ridiculous; Art Tatum came in; Louis Armstrong, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Hodges, Lester Young. You can imagine what a thrill it was to be in the same room with these people. I used to go sit in after my job at the Club Alabam and play with them. Then the management decided to hire a regular band at the Ritz Club so they'd always have somebody there to play when people came to sit in, and I was hired. That's when I started smoking pot; I was already drinking every night and taking pills.

  I was hanging around with Dexter Gordon. We smoked pot and took Dexedrine tablets, and they had inhalers in those days that had little yellow strips of paper in them that said "poison," so we'd put these strips in our mouths, behind our teeth. They really got you roaring as an upper: your scalp would tingle, and you'd get chills all over, and then it would center in your head and start ringing around. You'd feel as if your whole head was lifting off. I was getting pretty crazy, and right about that time, I think, Dexter started using smack, heroin.

  Dexter Gordon was an idol around Central Avenue. He was tall. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that made him seem like he was about seven feet tall. He had a stoop to his walk and wore long zoot suits, and he carried his tenor in a sack under his arm. He had these heavy-lidded eyes; he always looked loaded, always had a little half smile on his face. And everybody loved him. All the black cats and chicks would say, "Heeeeey, Dex!" you know, and pat him on the back, and bullshit with him. I used to stand around and marvel at the way they talked. Having really nothing to say, they were able to play these little verbal games back and forth. I envied it, but I was too selfconscious to do it. What I wouldn't give to ju
st jump in and say those things. I could when I was joking to myself, raving to myself, in front of the mirror at home, but when it came time to do it with people I couldn't.

  Lee Young was worried about me. I was so young. I think he felt he had an obligation to take care of me. Lee looked like the typical black musician of the '40s, the hep black man with the processed hair. He was light complected, very sharp, with diamond rings; he wore his clothes well; and he was a cat you'd figure could conduct himself in any situation. His brother was Lester Young, one of the greatest saxophone players that ever lived in this world. The most fantastic-equaled only fairly recently by John Coltrane. Better than Charlie Parker. In my humble opinion, better than Charlie Pa ;r, just marvelous, such beauty. And Lee, Lee played nice ums. He was capable but was in the shadow of his broth,., and I think he felt that. He loved his brother and was very proud of him, but I don't see how he could help but feel sad that he couldn't have played with his brother and really set the world on fire.

  Lee was very nice to me and thoughtful. To show you what kind of a person he was-I was playing my parts and nobody else would have worried about me. Why go out of their way to worry about a little white boy, you know? But Lee dug that I was hanging out with Dexter, and we were on that road, and he sat down with me. He said, "I've talked to Dexter, man, and he's got a way to go. There's cold awful dues he's got to pay and he's just going to have to pay 'em, I'm afraid. But you, man, why don't you-boy, I'd love to see you not have to pay those dues." I said, "No, I'm alright. I'm okay." He said, "Art, I really like you. I'd sure love to see you do right."

  At that time Jimmy Lunceford's band lost Willie Smith, who had played lead alto with them for a long time. He went with Harry James. So Kurt Bradford, who had been with Benny Carter, went to Jimmy Lunceford, and Lee got me an audition with Benny. He tried to get me a job where he thought I'd be protected. I auditioned and I made the band.

 

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