by Terry Castle
Pepper’s account of his early jazz and dope life, complete with stark portraits of some of the greatest talents of the era getting high and getting off (and often not getting back), was shocking in its matter-of-factness:
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.
And he was upfront—sometimes brutally—about yearning to imitate the flip, dandyish, hipster style that Gordon and other black postwar players cultivated so effortlessly:
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, he always had a little half smile on his face. And everybody loved him. All the black cats and chicks would say, “Heeeeeey, 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 self-conscious to do it. What I wouldn’t give to just 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.
Here, with a jolt, I saw him pin it down: the mortifying craving I (still) had for a certain uncensored verbal fluency. Nothing worse than the puerile, inhibited, what-an-idiot-I-am sensation you get when the words don’t come out in time and the world, blast it to hell, has moved on. And yet here he was acknowledging the failure, and in the process somehow exorcizing it. It struck me that one wish impelling autobiography since Rousseau must in fact be just this: the hope of pulling out—however unexpectedly—some last-minute psychic victory over l’esprit de l’escalier.
This said, I have to admit that what enthralled me most about Straight Life were the sex parts. From the beginning Art could be counted on to go way, way too far:
I had my first sexual experience I can remember when I was four or five. I was still living with my parents in Watts. They had some friends who lived nearby, Mary and Mike, who had a daughter, Francie, about four years older than me. Francie was slender, she had black hair, she had little bangs cut across and a pretty face, and she had a look about her of real precociousness. She had a devilish look about her, and she was very warm. Hot. She had nice lips, her teeth were real white, a pink tongue, and her cunt was pink and clean. A lot of little girls smell acid or stale, but…I remember sometimes we’d be playing together on the front lawn—there would be other kids around—and she would sit on my face in her little bloomers; nobody acted like they noticed anything. She’s sitting there, and I’m sniffing her ass and her cunt and her bloomers, and it always smelled real nice and sweet.
“Years and years later, when I was divorced from my first wife,” he remarks, “I ran into Francie, and I wanted to ball her, but she was in love and she wouldn’t do it.”
As an adult, Pepper screwed compulsively: waitresses and cocktail hostesses, women he met in all-night theaters, errant members of his teenage fan club, a female prison clerk at San Quentin, druggie chicks. He even went through a period as a Peeping Tom. (Once, he says, he espied a woman masturbating in her bathroom and watched her intently till he came in a burst, “all over my shorts and the top of my pants.” When she suddenly turned toward him—he was peeking in through a high window—he jumped down in a hurry and hied off down the street.) “Sex was in my thoughts all the time,” he admits, “and because of my upbringing I felt it was evil. That made it even more attractive to me, and the alcohol and the pills I took made my sex drive even stronger. I was obsessed.”
An especially filthy yarn he recounts—about seducing a hotel maid when he was on the road with Stan Kenton—reminded me of the time when I came home from junior high and found Hopper, one of the pre-Turk boyfriends, asleep and nude and snuffling in the little single bedroom that my mother and sister and I then shared. (This must have been on Waco Street.) It was only three in the afternoon but Hopper obviously had had a lot to drink and was sleeping it off. Maybe he was afraid that if he went back to the Navy base he’d get busted back down to Seaman Third Class. (As a twelve-year-old, I was obsessed with such details of service life. The whole setup sounded marvelous to me.) In Art’s story, the maid, a pretty young Latina woman, arrives one morning to clean the room when he is sitting in his bathrobe, hung over and bleary after a hard night of bingeing and blowing:
She had green eyes. I’ll never forget that, black hair and green eyes. I sat in a chair opposite the bathroom door. The door had a full-length mirror on it, and it was opened in such a way that I could see her in the mirror, but I was half in a daze. I really wasn’t paying much attention because I had a heavy hangover. When I woke up I always had a hangover, and if I could get to a bar, I’d have a Bloody Mary. If not, I’d have a few shots in my room. So I was having a drink when I looked up and looked into this mirror, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. She was cleaning the toilet bowl. She was standing, bent over but with her knees straight, which caused her dress to come up almost over her rear end, and she had black lace panties on, and I could see the beginning of this little mound and some wispy black hairs sticking out the sides of these little panties. She had gorgeous legs. It was a beautiful sight, and I thought, “This is too good to be true!” When she came in, she’d closed the door behind her. Some of them leave the door open a little bit. When they leave it open you’ve got to sneak over and try to push it closed and catch their reaction if there is one. You hope there’s no reaction.
I went and stood in the bathroom door, just looking at her. She’s cleaning away. After she finishes the toilet she bends over to get the floor. She’s wearing one of those half-brassieres, and with that button loose, I can see her breasts. I can see everything but the nipples. I can see down her dress to her navel. Needless to say I’ve got an erection. I move a little closer to her and she bends over the bathtub, and her uniform is all the way up over her ass. It was too much for me. I had my drink in my left hand; I put my right hand inside my robe and started playing with myself. If you can picture this…I’m standing in the bathroom right behind this beautiful creature who’s bent over so her ass is practically in my face, with those lace panties, with hair sticking out of the panties, and I’m jerking myself off, and I came that way, and as soon as I came I looked down, and she was looking at me through her legs. Her hand was on her cunt, and she was rubbing her cunt.
Hopper appeared to be completely out of it—no one else was home—so I had an excellent opportunity, Cupid and Psyche–like, to scrutinize his penis up close. It was red and big and mottled and poked up weirdly out of the bed sheets. What a horror show! I hate San Diego! How am I supposed to do my homework! Let’s go back to England! Leaving my books on the kitchen table, I stomped outside and for an hour or two patrolled the little apartment complex playground, brooding resentfully, till my mother came home with my sister. I never mentioned any of it. Forty years later I wonder: Was Hopper pretending to be asleep?
Reading through Art’s superprurient adventures—and I find them irresistible—your mind starts going to pot and strange new thoughts crowd in. Wow! Why not get a big tattoo of a squatting lady in high heels? It might look good! Or—How about making friends with that stripper at the gym, the funky Asian chick with the blue hair? (The one who’s always doing handstands and practicing the splits!) She might be fun to get drunk with! It all starts to seem normal—the strange fan-dance of chicks a
nd booze and sex and looking for a toilet in which to tie on a tourniquet. When we were first dating, Blakey once got querulous about something, really hostile, and informed me rather menacingly that she was “a red-blooded American male.” Pepper makes you into one, whether you like it or not. It’s like changing all of a sudden into a werewolf.
All the more surprising, then, the pathos the writer achieves when he describes courting Laurie, his last and “greatest love,” at Synanon in the seventies. Synanon itself—the most celebrated rehab program of its day—sounds like a Southern California cult nightmare, all rules and regulations and not being able to go to the bathroom without permission. At the Santa Monica “campus,” where Pepper lived for two years, there were the usual cult trappings: a charismatic guru (named Chuck) and army of live-in disciples; elaborate rewards and punishments for performing (or neglecting) communal household chores; and daily Khmer Rouge–style group therapy sessions in which the goal was to drive your fragile fellow addicts into a state of mental meltdown.
You’d be in a game with ten or fifteen people and if somebody, like, pissed on the toilet seat in their dorm or something like that, you’d tell it. You’d accuse him of it in front of the girls. When your covers are pulled in front of women it’s really a drag, so there’d be some wild shouting matches. They made up a lot of things, too, just to get you mad, to get you raving. Somebody’d accuse you of farting at night so loud they couldn’t sleep, or some chick would accuse some broad of throwing a bloody Kotex in the corner of the bathroom, leaving it laying there. The idea was that ranking you and exposing your bad habits would make you eventually change. And it worked, you know, it worked.
“Innumerable people,” Art notes, “were brainwashed like this.” Yet some also kicked the drugs. I’m not sure I would have done so well.
But it’s waterworks time when Pepper gets to wooing and winning Laurie. After staying sober and drug-free for some time, male and female Synanon residents who wanted to start a sexual relationship could petition the counselors to let them go on “dates” together: little walks around the neighborhood, trips to a nearby shopping mall, chaste bike rides. The formal courtship period accomplished, they might then request permission to spend a couple of hours together in the commune’s designated trysting place, a private room known as “the guestroom,” upstairs in one of the barracks-like dorms. Pepper was immediately attracted to Laurie, a former college student and music photographer, after meeting her one day on the Synanon bus. But on their first official date, he recalls, he nearly blew it completely. They walked toward the Santa Monica pier. It was a beautiful day. Laurie was wearing a short green dress, “suede, like velvet,” and Pepper thought she looked cute.
We walked to the pier and down to the end. On the way back we stopped at the merry-go-round. They have an old, old one there, still working. This old-time organ music was playing.
I felt wonderful. It seemed everything was working out fine. Laurie was very friendly and sweet and she really turned me on. We sat down on a bench and watched the merry-go-round. We made small talk, and I reached over and put my hand on her knee. She seemed to stiffen a bit, but she didn’t say anything. I left my hand on her knee, and it really turned me on. I started moving my hand up her thigh under her dress. She let out a roar and jumped up. She said, “I think we’d better go back.” We started walking back. I kept trying to put my arm around her, put my hand down her dress. She wouldn’t let me. I said, “Look what you do to me.” And I looked down to my front, and her eyes followed mine. I was wearing bathing trunks, and my pants were standing all out. I had a hard-on. She said, “Oh!” She really got embarrassed. I said, “Boy, I sure feel comfortable with you. I really feel relaxed.” She looked at me and said, “You feel relaxed? I don’t feel relaxed. I feel like I’m with some wild animal.”
Many apologies later, he convinces Laurie to sign up for the guestroom with him. In the anxious lead-up to this assignation, he worries incessantly about his potency (“I couldn’t remember the last time I’d balled without liquor or pills or dope”) and wonders if Laurie will be repulsed by his body. (Because of liver cirrhosis and the surgery he’d had to remove his ruptured spleen, his abdomen was permanently scarred and distended and lacked a belly button.
“It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen…It got to the point where I’d never take my shirt off. I hated to take a bath or a shower because I couldn’t stand to see myself.”) But all is well that ends well. After getting past a teasing gaggle of other residents—it’s the middle of the day and everyone knows exactly where he and Laurie are going—he finds the very acceptance that he craves:
I said, “Let’s go up to the room.” She said, “Why don’t you go up and I’ll follow. Or I’ll go up. Please, you go get some coffee and bring it up. I’ll have the bed made by the time you get there.” I went for coffee. Everybody was saying, “Yeah! Work out, Art!” And, “Boy, I know you’re going to enjoy that!” It was really far-out. I liked it. But all the attention got me nervous again. What if I couldn’t get a hard-on being sober? I carried the coffee up the stairs, trying not to spill it. Six floors. No elevator. By the time I got there I was just panting. She’s got the bed made and the shades pulled. She said, “Look what I got.” She’d lit some candles, really pretty. I put the coffee down. We looked at each other for a moment. There was no strangeness at all. All of a sudden we had our clothes off and we were laying on the bed making love, and it was the most beautiful thing in the world. And it was so vivid. There was no numbness from juice or stuff. After we finally separated, we lay there looking at each other and I tried to cover up my stomach. At first I’d had a shirt on, but Laurie’d made me take it off; now I reached for it, but she said, “Oh, please don’t. I think it’s beautiful. That’s you. You look real. I like the marks around your eyes, everything about you. I don’t like a pretty man without wrinkles or scars.” She stroked my stomach, and she kissed it.
One perhaps can imagine the scene: just listen to “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”—tender, tenebrous, ensorcelling—on Modern Art: The Complete Art Pepper Aladdin Recordings, Volume Two. Love leads the way.
Now wet blankets everywhere will be saying, This is all such a load of crap. The dope, the tattoos, the goofing, the living-without-a-belly-button, the creepy redemption-through-a-good-woman—what a self-destructive (and self-deluding) bastard Art Pepper must have been. And what’s up with you, Terry Castle, that you claim to like this guy? I admit it: it is strange. And I probably can’t keep wiggling out of it by joking about it being a sex thing. Toward the end of Straight Life there’s a long and absorbing interview with one of Pepper’s old Synanon pals, a sixties-style dyke named Karolyn. Despite never having had any interest in men, she reveals, she once considered sleeping with Pepper anyway, mainly because he was funny and intelligent and “a kindred soul somehow.” I know what she means. The tenderness between lesbians and straight men is the real Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. (Consider Stein and Hemingway, Bishop and Lowell, k.d. lang and Tony Bennett, or me and my best pal Rob.) But even she acknowledges that Art had a “sadistic streak” and liked to play nasty games with people. She disses poor Laurie (the interviewer-wife) for falling in with Pepper’s “egotistical” demands. Like all “macho men,” Karolyn complains, “Art needed to have a ma,” someone he could “be a baby around.”
When I started to do some research on Pepper, as soon as Bev and I returned to San Francisco, I found that a number of prominent jazz writers held similar views. One of the books I’d bought before going home for Christmas was Ben Ratliff’s 2002 The New York Times Essential Library: Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings. I now perused it in detail and was dismayed to discover that Ratliff, the Times’s impressive, frighteningly savvy, thirty-something jazz critic, was a pretty major Art basher. True, he listed Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section in his top 100 CDs, but mainly, it seemed, so he could take youthful swats at certain canonical jazz classics (such as Miles Davi
s’s Kind of Blue) that he thought too arty and studio-fied:
If you’re interested in the great unmasterpiece, workmanlike toss-offs of jazz—if you feel like you have to enter a soundproof chamber before you can properly deal with carefully considered concept records like Kind of Blue or A Love Supreme or Take Five—[Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section] is a good place to start.
As for Straight Life itself, Ratliff seemed irritated by its very existence. Since I was in the throes of instant fandom, having just picked up eight more Pepper CDs at Tower Records in the Castro and begun blabbering about the memoir to everyone I knew, this cool-guy jadedness was disconcerting.
The issue for Ratliff seemed to be Art’s honesty—or lack of it. He takes issue, in particular, with a famous passage in Straight Life in which the saxophonist describes the taping session for Meets the Rhythm Section at a Hollywood studio in early 1957. Pepper hadn’t played for half a year at that point, the mouthpiece on his alto had rotted away, and he was completely strung out (he says) on heroin and booze. The hapless Diane had to drag him out of their apartment. (“She said, ‘It’s time to go.’ I called her a few choice words: ‘You stinkin’ motherfucker, you! I’d like to kill you, you lousy bitch! You’ll get yours!’ I then went into the bathroom and fixed a huge amount.”) At the studio he was too dazed, he claims, even to know what music he was supposed to be recording. But there was no place to hide: “I was going to have to play with Miles Davis’s rhythm section.”
They played every single night, all night. I hadn’t touched my horn in six months. And being a musician is like being a professional basketball player. If you’ve been on the bench for six months you can’t all of a sudden just go into the game and play, you know. It’s almost impossible. And I realized that that’s what I had to do, the impossible. No one else could have done it. At all. Unless it was someone as steeped in the genius role as I was. As I am. Was and am. And will be. And will always be. And have always been. Born, bred, and raised, nothing but a total genius! Ha! Ahahaha!