by Terry Castle
Here I was in this gorgeous room, comparable to any hotel I’d ever stayed in; I had my own private patio with flowers and lawn and birds chirping; and every four hours this pretty nurse would come in and give me an enormous shot of morphine. And I was just blind: I tripped out and sang to myself and made funny noises and looked at myself in the mirror. I stood in the bathroom for hours looking at myself and giggling, saying, “Boy, what a handsome devil you are!” I had a beautiful body. I’d get in the shower and bathe and get out and take a hand mirror and put it on the floor and look at my body from the floor. I’d look at my rear end and the bottom of my balls and the bottom of my joint, and I would play with myself until I got a hard-on and then gaze into this mirror and say, “What a gorgeous thing you are!”
It’s a fact: as soon as female-to-male transsexuals get their stubby new little tubercles, they instantly want to become gay men.
The problem with Bev’s Taurus is no CD player (author’s note, 2010: the iPod had yet to be invented), so I had unplugged my office boom box, crammed it with six giant new batteries and brought it along, too. In addition to all the jazz stuff—Bird, Dexter, Dizzy, Sonny, Miles, Ornette, Dolphy, the delectable Jimmy Giuffre—I’d filled several shopping bags with a small sampling of the rest of my CD collection, designed to satisfy whatever kind of recondite musical fix I might need on the road. Thus, all stacked up and ready to go were Conlon Nancarrow, Fatboy Slim, DJ Cheb I Sabbah, Ludwig Spohr, Amalia Rodriguez, Johnny Cash, Dame Myra Hess, Sigur Rós, Verklärte Nacht, Brenda Lee, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Gus Viseur à Bruxelles 1949, the Pogues, some early Leontyne Price (yum), White Stripes, Charpentier, Delalande, Coney Island Baby, Historic Flamenco, Rusalka, the Bad Plus, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Son House, Reynaldo Hahn (the real guy, quavering away at the piano!), Busoni’s Bach arrangements, Ginette Neveu, the Stanley Brothers, Tessie O’Shea, Milton Babbitt, The Rough Guide to Rai, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Charles Trenet, Ska Almighty, John Dowland, the organ music of Johann Fux (heh heh), Ian Bostridge, the Ramones, Astor Piazzola, Ethel Merman’s Disco Album, Magnetic Fields, Flagstad and Svanholm in Die Walkurie, Lord Kitchener and the Calypso All-Stars, Sonic Youth, Youssou N’Dour, tons of the Arditti Quartet, Kurt Cobain, Suzy Solidor, John McCormack, Greek rembetiko music, Jan and Dean, Los Pinguinos del Norte, Shostakovich film scores, Some Girls, Wunderlich doing Butterfly (in luscious, spittle-ridden German), Cuban contredances, Planet Squeezebox, some croaky old Carter Family, Morton Feldman, Beatrice Lilly (and fairies at the bottom of the garden), Elmore James, Giulio Cesare, Miss Kitty Wells, Vespro della Beata Vergine, South Pacific, Pet Sounds, Les Negresses Vertes, Dusty in Memphis, Ferrier’s Kindertötenlieder, Toots and the Maytals, Têtes Raides, Lulu, Lulu—even Gurdjieff’s potty piano ramblings. He always makes me think of Katherine Mansfield.
But things went AWOL from the start. Stopping for gas at Casa de Frutta, between Highways 101 and 5, I found the batteries in the boom box weren’t working. I’d held off on playing anything up to that point because it was too early in the morning for serious listening—we’d left at dawn—but now, after coffee, I was craving something. Imprecations, followed by ferocious jerking out of batteries in the Chevron parking lot. Fumbling attempts at reinstallation, in every possible permutation of plus and minus—even, despairingly, plus to plus. Bev, watching patiently, said, well, we can listen to my tapes. Tapes! I glared at her and peered into the shoebox of dusty old cassettes in the trunk. Could I survive for ten hours solely on Sylvester, the soundtrack from The Crying Game, and The Greatest Hits of Etta James? Now, “Down in the Basement” is a major song and Etta one of the supreme live performers. Once, at a surreal outdoor concert at the Paul Masson Winery, marooned among pre-tech-stock-crash Silicon Valley yuppies dutifully sipping chardonnay, I watched her do the plumpest, most lascivious cakewalk imaginable. But I could hardly live on her for the rest of the day. I started squawking like an infuriated baby vulture.
Back in the Taurus it went from bad to worse: the dashboard tape deck wasn’t working, either. Perhaps there had been a nuclear explosion somewhere—that, I knew, immediately shut down car electrical systems. We’d all have to swallow some potassium iodide. I resigned myself, imperfectly, to a day of protracted misery. Miles and miles of interstate wilderness (complete with a nasty tire blowout): wintry fields and irrigation ditches along 5, grayed-out almond orchards, the California state prison at Avenal. Then the three-hour eight-lane chaos of L.A.: Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, Anaheim, Irvine, Long Beach, Oceanside, and Camp Pendleton. All along the southern coast the Marines were doing sea-to-land exercises. Bev, at the wheel and the long-suffering target of my ire, turned on the radio in self-defense at one point and began flipping from station to station with the seek button—derangingly—every two or three seconds. Burbly soft rock, stale oldies, Dean Martin singing Christmas carols, Mexican polka music, endless mirthless ads for Petco and Wal-Mart: the full auditory wasteland of American popular culture assailed us. Shades of when we used to be girlfriends. We bickered most of the rest of the way. By the time we rolled up, exhausted, in my mother’s driveway, trundled in with the packages and admired the Christmas tree, so loaded with decorations and synthetic flocking you could hardly see the branches, my assaulted ears needed a thorough cleaning out with a washrag.
Yuletide in San Diego was the usual: sunny and soporific, the suburban ennui immediate, dazing, and total. The cats, senile and comatose, took up most of the available seating. (They had long ago given up trying to pull low-hanging ornaments off the tree.) Charlie moped in the yard under the orange tree; Bev read old copies of the National Enquirer and crunched on See’s California Brittle. I found myself perusing Via, the official newsletter of the American Automobile Association, in a state of morose torpor. Every now and then an F-18 from Miramar Naval Air Station, just a couple of miles to the north, would scream over the house on one of its morning practice flights, rending the sky with a colossal sonic boom.*
My mother, oblivious to the booms, prattled away happily and brought up her favorite Web sites for us to look at on the television screen. Since Turk’s death six years ago and the invention of Prozac, she’s morphed into the Merry Widow. In 2001 she started subscribing to Web TV and now sits, portable keyboard perched on lap, two feet in front of her giant set, avidly surfing the Internet for seven or eight hours a day. She’s got her “Brit Group” to talk to, a gang of elderly UK ex-pats who maintain a busy online chat room about the doings of the royal family and how to find Marmite in Kansas, as well as a small legion of Martha Stewart–ish arts and crafts sites that need checking out daily. My mother’s heavily into polymer clay jewelry making and rubber stamp art. The day before Christmas, as a way of filling the time, she and I went to a craft supply shop in Old Town in search of fimo dough for the somewhat Neolithic-looking bead necklaces she’d begun making. (She cuts the strange stuff into slices using a pasta maker; makes little slugs out of the pieces; then slings them all into a toaster-oven.) I found some austere-looking rubber stamps with Vitruvian capitals on them, and bought several, along with some jet black ink. Robespierre would have approved. I figured I could decorate the page-proofs of my still yet-to-be written Pompadour essay with them. Or even make facetious greeting cards celebrating Thermidor and Fructidor.
At a certain point I realized that the Pompadour essay wasn’t going to happen. The books I had been reading about her were perfectly fine but I was losing interest in the lady herself. She had become pink and odious. I started wondering if she had ever really existed. She could be a totally made-up person: some elaborate hoax, in effect. I got ratty and rough and churlish—so much so that one evening, after I blew my stack in the car on the way to the Indian restaurant, my mother was forced, like a weary civilian reaffixing a gas mask, to assume her classic Deeply-Wounded-by-Unpleasant-Daughter-but-Carrying-On-Bravely look. She said I needed anger management therapy. (“It’s not just for men now—women get it, too.”) I knew I wasn’t being very festiv
e. But the Goncourts weren’t helping much either. Apart from reprising Diderot’s great line on the Boucher portraits—“they have everything, Monsieur, but the truth”—the brothers seemed strangely dull, more feeble and syphilitic than I remembered.
Perhaps it was true: I was tiring of the eighteenth century. For twenty years it had been my academic meal ticket. But I seemed to be twisting, torquing away from it. Starting to like it only when it got marred and eccentric, a kind of broken, perverse, junk rococo. Singerie. Pockmarks. Freemasonry. Chess-playing automatons. Ultracreepy things like Marat’s skin diseases. (He spent all his time in that hip bath on account of a maddening case of dermatitis.) Maybe because my psoriasis has flared up so badly this past winter—every morning when I woke up in San Diego I discovered a drift of huge white flakes on the pillowcase—I had developed an unwholesome interest in the epidermal problems of historical figures. My mother said my skin ailments were identical to hers. Naturally! Had Jack the Ripper preferred dandruff to intestines, she—and I—would have been the perfect victims.
But the jazz thing was also getting obsessive. My reveries were becoming increasingly boppish and monomaniacal. In one of the Pompadour books I’d been reading, the author had explained the fey jargon affected by Louis XV and his courtiers at Versailles: “Court language and pronunciation were quite different from that of Paris; courtiers said ‘roue’ for ‘roi,’ ‘chev soi’ for ‘chez soi’ certain words and phrases were never used, ‘cadeau’ should be ‘présent,’ ‘louis d’or’ should be ‘louis en or,’ and so on.” Lots of room here, obviously, for some LRB-ish, off-with-their-heads moralizing: how we loathe the upper classes! But what I found myself thinking of instead was the sad and dreamy little language invented by Lester Young—Absolute Monarch of the Swing Tenor—after his disastrous nervous breakdown in the U.S. Army in the 1940s:
Many claims, some of them vague and inflated, have been made about the linguistic originality of black American English, but in the case of Lester Young’s language, such claims seem to have some substance. Buck Clayton believed Lester coined the usage of the word “bread” to mean money, when he asked of a job, “How does the bread smell?” To express his own hurt feelings he would say he had been “bruised”—a frequently heard word in the Young vocabulary. Another favorite expression was “Ivey Divey” which signaled a rather bleak, stoic acceptance of some misfortune. Lester also used the title “Lady,” which he had bestowed on Billie Holiday, as a rather unnerving handle to the names of male friends and colleagues. It was a habit which along with his rather languid, camp manner, gave the wholly inaccurate impression that he was homosexual.*
Especially when my mother’s jabs began hitting the mark, I found myself moodily adapting some of Lester’s plaints. “The other ladies make all the bread.” “I ain’t groovy like the other ladies.” “Those LRB cats goin’ to give all their reviewing gigs to the other ladies.” It was a struggle to be even halfway ivey-divey.
Art, it turned out, was my salvation—though not in the way I expected. There’s no CD player at my mother’s: she’s still got—believe it or not—the same wacky fake-wood-grained cabinet-style phonograph we had in the Buena Vista apartments in the 1960s. It has spindly metal legs and space-age styling and looks like something the Eameses might have designed on a not-so-good day. Granted, I can get all weepy and nostalgic just looking at the thing. Back in the eighth grade, I was so addicted to surreptitious music listening, I would get up at 6:00 a.m. and in the hour or so before I had to go to school glut myself (ever so quietly) on cherished selections from my small and eccentric LP collection. (I had to keep the volume absurdly low so not to wake up my mother or Tracy.) Prized possessions back then were a budget Everest recording of Beethoven’s Seventh, the complete works of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, some huge, breakers-rolling-in-to-shore Rachmaninoff, and my favorite: Elizabethan Lute Songs. (My mother noticed the record jacket of the last-mentioned one day and opined, with a strange stare, that Julian Bream and Peter Pears were “pansies.”) In my current technological fix, however, it was obvious that the ancient family sound machine wasn’t up to much. The boom box was still non compos mentis. Forced to adopt emergency measures—under normal circumstances I loathe listening on headphones—I ended up buying an ugly red Walkman at the Rite-Aid on the morning of Christmas Eve.
I won’t say too much about Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section: even the most garrulous bride needs to keep a few things about her wedding night a secret. Suffice it to note that as soon as I pressed the Walkman “play” button in bed that night I started having the Parsifal Reaction: the overpowering sense that I knew the music already, that it had been laid down in my heart in advance of my ever coming into consciousness, that I was somehow—uncannily—bringing it all into being as I listened. (Hearing the Wagner for the first time at a 1982 screening of Syberberg’s adaptation, I became lost, in private druggy transport, for five straight hours.) I also knew that Art’s moves were too beautiful and prodigious to absorb all in one go; I was going to have to ration him carefully in order to make him last a lifetime. Even the slightest, most gestural songs were like being delicately rocked in a cradle. Life was warm and good! I had to call Blakey to tell her. I quit listening on the fourth cut, “Waltz Me Blues,” quite overmastered by the handsome jailbird’s groove.
I began devouring Straight Life the same night and by the time I fell asleep had read a good 200 pages. Like his music, Pepper’s verbal style was thrilling: licentious, colloquial, and so painfully human I could hardly bear it. Christmas turned into a get-through-it blur of leftover turkey and wrapping paper: for the next forty-eight hours, till Bev and I loaded up the car again for San Francisco on the twenty-sixth, I was mainlining Art nightly without shame. True, he was Orphic and amoral and narcissistic, prone to a kind of pervasive, mad, jazzy self-servicing. (In his introduction to the 1994 paperback reissue of Straight Life, the jazz critic Gary Giddins warns the reader that it is often hard to admire Pepper: “he whines, justifies, patronizes, and vilifies” and goes “overboard…with intimate revelations.”) But along with the spleen and pussy lore, Pepper offered himself up with such astonishing vulnerability I found my eyes welling up repeatedly. I read away at a frenetic bebop pace—uptempo all the way—but also felt curiously mangled by the experience: inwardly appalled to realize just how contemptuous I could be, I’m afraid, toward people less fortunate or comfortable than myself. Yes, I had survived—almost fifty and not dead yet!—but at what cost? In my professional life I was becoming a mini bigwig. (Or perhaps a biggish mini wig.) So why in middle age was I still so frightened and so cruel? The usual cozy, bespectacled, reading-in-bed smirk kept getting wiped off my face.
Some of it was just the chastening rush of the style: so plain, blatant, and free. Startlingly, the epigraph to Straight Life was from Pound. “What is the use of talking and there is no end of talking. There is no end of things in the heart.” But Pepper (or his amanuensis, Laurie) might easily have chosen something from Defoe or Swift, so blunt and Anglo-Saxon, pitiless and fine, his narrative of life’s enormities. From the first pages on, a short dispassionate sketch of the shipwreck of his childhood, Pepper goes straight indeed to the heart of things that have no end:
During this period we lived in Watts, and my father continued going to sea. He hated my mother for what she had tried to do [abort her baby]. She was going out with this Betty; I don’t know what they did. They’d drink. I’d be left alone. The only time I was shown any affection was when my mother was just sloppy drunk, and I could smell her breath. She would slobber all over me.
One time when my father had been at sea for quite a while he came home and found the house locked and me sitting on the front porch, freezing cold and hungry. She was out somewhere. She didn’t know he was coming. He was drunk. He broke the door down and took me inside and cooked me some food. She finally came home, drunk, and he cussed her out. We went to bed. I had a little crib in the corner, and my dad wanted to get in bed w
ith me. He didn’t want to sleep with her. She kept pulling on him, but he pushed her away and called her names. He started beating her up. He broke her nose. He broke a couple of ribs. Blood poured all over the floor. I remember the next day I was scrubbing up blood, trying to get the blood up for ages.
After his parents split up, he relates, he was shunted off to his grandmother’s, to the tiny redneck town where she lived with an aged swain:
Nuevo was a country hamlet. Children should enjoy places like that, but I was so preoccupied with the city and with people, with wanting to be loved and trying to find out why other people were loved and I wasn’t, that I couldn’t stand the country because there was nothing to see. I couldn’t find out anything there. Still, to this day, when I’m in the country I feel this loneliness. You come face to face with a reality that’s so terrible. This was a little farm out in the wilderness. There was this old guy, her second husband, I think. I don’t even remember him he was so inconsequential. And there was the wind blowing.
(Not so far off again: I remember a hot dusty day in the mid-sixties when my mother drove us out to Poway see a friend of hers, a young woman named Donna, our former downstairs neighbor, who’d moved out of the apartments with her newborn baby when her husband Mike had shipped out to Vietnam. She’d found a kind of shack on a brush-covered slope where the rent was only fifty dollars a month, cheaper even than the apartments. Poway is a strip-mall suburb now, looped around with freeway sound walls and indistinguishable from the rest of the eastern San Diego County sprawl, but in 1966 the feeling of rural desolation was just as Pepper describes. I spent the afternoon reading The Hobbit and scratching in the dirt with a stick.)