by Terry Castle
You have to hate yourself for quite a while—and then somehow move beyond it—to get this loose and crazy in print. But Ratliff seems to dislike both the junkie melodrama and the whole comicograndiose Pepper persona. Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section may be an “honest record”—or so he grudgingly allows—but “if you believe the story of its making you’d have to conclude that Pepper, unprepared and unarmored, was forced to pull the music out of himself, since tepid run-throughs and stock licks weren’t going to work in such exalted company.” In the end one gets the feeling that Pepper is just too much for Ratliff, that the old guy has to be defended against—not only for playing the sax, doping up, and balling chicks to startling excess, but for describing it so unambiguously, with the ludic genius of a trailer-park Villon. He’s an outlandish daddy-o from some time before les neiges d’antan—if Southern California can indeed be said to have had them.
Against such skepticism I can only counterpose, however naïve it must sound, my own readerly intuition, the faith developed over a lifetime of book-worming that even when an autobiographer is prone to distorting or embellishing the facts, it is still possible to locate some core emotional truth in the writing. Why read a memoir otherwise? Nobody would bother with Rousseau’s Confessions if they didn’t believe there was something to “get” about Rousseau by doing so. Somewhere in The Interpretation of Dreams, I seem to recall, Freud remarks that if a patient in an analytic session tries to deceive the analyst by concocting a dream for discussion and interpretation, the fake dream will be just as revealing as a real dream. You can’t invent a dream-story, in other words, without drawing on exactly the same repressed material present in the “authentic” dream. Your grimy psychic fingerprints will still be all over the steering wheel.
I like this idea, in part because it relates to something I’ve come to believe more and more about both writing and music making: that in order to succeed at either you have to stop trying to disguise who you are. The veils and pretenses of everyday life won’t work; a certain minimum truth-to-self is required. Pepper makes a similar point in his life story when he observes that jazz musicians really only play themselves: the greatest and most fertile improvisations are transmissions from within. Describing the impact of John Coltrane on his playing in the late sixties—in emulation of Coltrane he actually took up the tenor for a while after getting out of San Quentin—Pepper acknowledges that the overpowering Coltrane sound was not something, after a while, he could afford to get lost in:
It enabled me to be more adventurous, to extend myself notewise and emotionally. It enabled me to break through the inhibitions that for a long time had kept me from growing and developing. But since the day I picked up the alto again I’ve realized that if you don’t play yourself you’re nothing. And since that day I’ve been playing what I felt, what I felt, regardless of what those around me were playing or how they thought I should sound.
You can hear Art playing himself everywhere in his oeuvre; just load up the player and start in any place: with “You and the Night and the Music” or “Tickle Toe” or “All of Me” with “Surf Ride” or “Nutmeg” or “These Foolish Things” with “Junior Cat” or “Angel Wings” or “Why Are We Afraid?” with “Zenobia” or “Chili Pepper” or “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me,” or (one of my huge favorites) “Long Ago and Far Away.” Magical she may be, but Jo Stafford has nothing on Pepper in the truth-and-beauty department.
So, Core Emotional Truth Time: why am I obsessed with Art Pepper? The first reason should be obvious: because he’s dead and I don’t have to deal with him. He’s a safely freeze-dried genius. I can sample him when I like and don’t have to clean up the vomit or piss or deal with the discarded works on the bathroom floor. He’s as predictable now as a twenty-bit digital transfer. He’s always ready to talk—in his own way—but only when I put in a request. (Hey, Art, let’s have “Suzy the Poodle”!) You can hear him talk—literally and often hilariously—on the four-volume live set, The Complete Village Vanguard Sessions, from 1977. But the words never change. He has never asked me yet to get a bouffant or wear shiny pink nail polish. He’s the perfect man for me.
The second reason may be less obvious: because he’s not my stepbrother Jeff. I’ve managed to leave Jeff out of this piece thus far—or almost. (He appeared briefly, like a stowaway, in the first paragraph.) But I’ve been thinking about him constantly, somewhat wretchedly, as I’ve been writing. This process of composition, needless to say, has been more protracted than I originally intended. Christmas is now long past; a second Gulf War has begun; I’ve lost twenty pounds by kicking my chocolate habit; and I’m still here at the keyboard. I’ve put off finishing for so long, I suspect, because the only ending I can see is not very pretty. Looks to be more like a set of honks, squawks, or bent notes, or one of Art’s grubbier self-revelations.
Grubbiness in a moment; first, the uncanny. The uncanny part of my heroin Christmas came as Bev and I were driving back to San Francisco on the morning of the twenty-sixth. We’d decided to take 101 all the way for a change, though it makes the overall journey an hour longer. I’d done Highway 5 so many times over the past few years I couldn’t face it again—especially since, as on the trip down, we were going to have to go the whole way with no music other than the radio. At least on 101 you get to drive next to the ocean for longer and at one point pass through Santa Barbara. I’ve always liked Santa Barbara; even if it’s mainly 1920s fake-Spanish, it reminds me of how California used to be when I was a kid, before my parents split up.
You also go up the western rather than eastern side of Los Angeles. That was how we ended up whizzing by the familiar freeway exit (just past Mulholland Drive) for Van Nuys and Burbank Boulevard. Not so far beyond Getty-Land. David Hockney–Land. Isherwood-and-Bachardy–Land. But so different. I thought at once of my stepsister Lee and how I’d stayed with her and Greg for two months in the summer of 1983, just before I took up my job at Stanford. Their house, a pokey little tract home on a cul-de-sac off Van Nuys Boulevard, abutted at the rear onto a huge new car dealership. I used to sleep in the tiny spare room back there, on a fold-out couch next to the gun cabinet and pinball machine. Every night till midnight, while I tried vainly to sleep, a strident female voice, loudly amplified over the car-lot paging system, would regularly summon various salesmen to the white courtesy telephone. The huge fluorescent light towers illuminating the cars bathed the objects in my room in a strange spectral glow.
I’d just come from Harvard, where I’d been lonely out of my mind for three years at the Society of Fellows, and had a summer research fellowship at the Clark Library at UCLA. I was a scholar of the eighteenth century! I had a job at Stanford! I was writing my second book! Yes, ahem, it’s about the masquerades of the period. You know, masquerades. Each day I trundled off to the Clark in Turk’s turquoise Mustang, which he’d loaned me for the summer. I tried to stay at the library each day for as long as I could because being at Lee and Greg’s depressed me. Lee never worked and so she was always there, drinking and eating and watching television, with the odd little foray out into the alley now and then to snoop through her neighbors’ garbage cans. I didn’t know anyone else in Los Angeles, and was still a fairly timid young woman, but even so, I’m not quite sure why I ended up staying there. I hadn’t got much money and I guess I wanted to please my mother. My mother had suggested it, maybe as a way of symbolically marking my return to California after twelve years away at school. Back within Hailing Distance and Even Residing (Temporarily) with a Member of the Family! Of course she didn’t like Lee much either, although unlike the rest of Turk’s offspring—Dee Dee the crack addict, Linda, the put-upon wife of a ne’er do well, and Jeff the sociopath—Lee had at least married someone halfway decent. Greg was actually good-looking in a Tom Selleck–ish way; no one could figure out what he saw in Lee. Lee was fat and smelled bad; her teeth were brown from smoking. She wore big sweat-stained tank tops and stretch pants. Greg’s most thrilling momen
t, he once told me, had been installing Burgess Meredith’s telephone system at a house in Beverly Hills.
Jeff had died six months earlier, at their house. He’d been living with them for a few months beforehand, had even—unbelievably—found some sort of pathetic job in Van Nuys, working as a delivery boy for a caterer. (My mother told me later the caterer was an older gay guy who thought he was cute.) All Christmas Day till late, Jeff was out delivering things; Lee and Greg went away somewhere overnight. When they came back on the morning of the twenty-sixth, they found him in the middle of the living room—brains, wet hair, odd gobbets of flesh, scattered around on the furniture and carpeting. He hadn’t left a note but had propped up his high school graduation equivalency certificate near where he lay.
By the time I stayed there, of course, the carpet had been replaced. Lee only mentioned Jeff a couple of times. (Greg never did at all.) The first time was to say that he had been “murdered” by some evil black men. She got up in my face as she said it—a female Uriah Heep—and I was disgusted by her. The second was to excoriate a spur-of-the-moment visit my mother paid me in Boston right after Jeff died. (I remember that visit well: we went out of the house one cold sunny Cambridge morning and, without warning, my mother threw up some weird orange stuff in the snow. She laughed and we went on to Harvard Square as if nothing had happened. We ate lunch at Dolphin Seafood, even though it was the middle of winter.) My mother hadn’t been able to face Turk’s bottomless despair. Lee was foul-mouthed and critical.
As soon as Bev and I passed the exit it struck me: almost twenty years to the minute—10:00 a.m., December 26, 2002—since Jeff killed himself. He had now been dead almost as long as he’d been alive. And I’d had exactly that long, too—two decades—to think about him dead, always with the deepest sense of relief. You have to understand that Jeff was a nightmare: Turk’s youngest child and his only son, grotesquely doted on by Turk, though Turk was mostly away at sea on submarines during Jeff’s infancy and early childhood. By the time Turk’s first wife dropped dead in the yard in front of the kids—a few months before Turk and my mother started dating—Jeff had already started to go to the bad. At the age of eight or nine he was a smoker and heavy drinker, prone to pilfering vodka and mixing it with cough syrup. He took up drugs in junior high. Since Turk came over every evening to see my mother, Jeff and his sisters, nominally under the care of Lee, the eldest, ran wild. I hated it when we had to drive across San Diego to see them, or go along with them on some grisly group excursion; I was already a ghastly prig. But somehow I adjusted. We were (to me) mortifyingly poor—my mother barely kept things going on the $200 a month she got for child support from my father—and after a while Turk started picking up groceries for us at the Navy base. Whenever he came over, plump and tan and amiable in his khaki chief’s uniform, he usually brought Tracy and me M&M’s. He was hoping my mother would marry him—kids and all—and she ultimately did four years later, in 1971, when I went away on a scholarship to college and the child support from my father abruptly fell to $100 a month. She didn’t work; she felt she had no choice.
Granted, Jeff never did heroin—or not that I know of. Even so, my mother and Turk had plenty to cope with throughout the 1970s. The violence started in his early teens. He skipped school whenever possible and one day broke into a house down the street. The owner, a youngish divorcée with two small children, was home; he lurched drunkenly after her with a hunting knife. He reviled her, said she was a bitch and he was going to kill her, chased her round her living room, then slashed her couch wide open in a fury so all the stuffing came out. When he was arrested, he seemed sullen and indifferent, even mute. He never had any explanation for what he did and wouldn’t answer questions.
Jeff didn’t seem to be motivated by anything sexual. Nothing obvious, anyway. Though by the age of fifteen or so he had grown into a tough, hard, butch-looking young man, he never had a girlfriend or indeed a friend of any sort. He was muscular and short with close-cropped hair. (His head was often shaved in the youth detention camps in which he was periodically incarcerated.) From some angles he looked a bit like Genet, though wasn’t like him in any other way. I am tempted to say—knowing how ruthless it must sound—that Jeff had no interiority. He never seemed to be thinking or feeling. He rarely smiled; hardly ever spoke; seldom evinced an interest in anything, at least when at home. He had no humor or fantasy. Whenever he was around, he ignored my mother and Turk and sat balefully on the couch, watching television. I never saw him reading or talking on the phone. One of the first psychiatrists to examine him—Jeff must have only been about twelve at the time—said he had the same psychological profile as Charles Whitman, the guy who shot six or seven people from the clock tower at the University of Texas in the mid-sixties.
I was away at school; I managed to stay mostly out of it. During my five years in graduate school especially I hardly ever went to see my mother. I studied for exams and listened to music. I lived alone and sometimes smoked hashish by myself. I got some of my first jazz LPs: the late Billie Holiday sides on Verve, The Gentle Side of John Coltrane, Betty Carter, Ornette’s Dancing in Your Head. The latter had just come out and I listened to it a lot when I was trying to get over the Professor. I loved Die Entfürung aus dem Serail and Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona. But I heard about Jeff all the time: how he’d drunk up Turk’s booze, smashed cars, stolen money, lied compulsively. My mother had an emotional breakdown in the mid-seventies—she and Turk fought constantly over him—and she was in the Navy hospital for a while. I didn’t go to see her. Turk usually defended Jeff, and had long fatuous father-son “talks” with him, during which Jeff would not respond. Turk was a kindly man but weak. I developed a private theory that Jeff was brain-damaged, a lobe incorrectly folded somewhere. He seemed mentally defective. He spoke with a strange, slurry, adenoidal sound, as if his throat and nostrils were full of phlegm. For most of the seventies and into the eighties I lived with the recurrent fear that he would kill my mother or Turk or both.
In the late 1970s Turk somehow pulled some strings and got Jeff into the Marines. Jeff learned hand-to-hand combat and sea rescues and pugil stick fighting at Camp Pendleton. Not long after his unit shipped out to Australia, he beat up a prostitute in Sydney so savagely she almost died. He was in the brig for a while, then the Marines tossed him out. Turk, ever hopeful, wangled another billet for him, this time in the Navy reserves. Jeff went to sea again for six months, during which time he got into a bar fight in Hawaii and killed a Samoan man with his bare hands. Throttled the guy till his eyes almost popped out. The military lawyer argued it was self-defense—successfully—but Jeff received a less than honorable discharge. Soon after that, I guess, he went to live with Lee and Greg in L.A. and started working for the gay caterer.
I think of Jeff as someone who had no language, or no language other than brutality. Not that he couldn’t read or write, on a primitive level. One of the strangest things about his death were some crude letters—presumably sent back and forth between him and another Marine—that turned up in a closet afterwards. They could only be described as billets-doux—but sick, obscene ones. Full of things like, I going to fuck you cunt, you fuckin cunt, suck my dick, scrawled in pencil. My mother told me about them once, how upset Turk had been. Turk himself idolized other men but his homoeroticism was sentimental and unconscious. He was short and diabetic and had soft, bosomy breasts. He didn’t like taking his shirt off. He used to say he wanted to kill all the fags. (He politely pretended not to know about me.) The happiest time in his life had been when he was under the North Pole for months in a nuclear submarine. It was so hot and claustrophobic down there, he said, he and the other guys spent most of their time in their skivvies, and sometimes even polished the torpedoes in the nude.
But it was Jeff’s fate to stay locked up inside himself. He did not have the genius, the munificent resources, of an Art Pepper. Art has a story in Straight Life about almost killing somebody, just before he got out of San Quentin. He
’d been put in the prison “adjustment center” for glue sniffing and overdosing on some contraband pills called black and whites:
It had a lot of romance, being in the adjustment center. People look up to you for being there and being cool, not whining. There were guys in there waiting to go to trial for murder or for shanking people, and I was digging this whole scene. I’d hear the others talk, and I started thinking how great it would be to kill someone and really be accepted as a way out guy. All the guys that were really in would know about it. “Man, that cat, Art Pepper, he wasted a cat, cut him to ribbons. Stabbed him and stabbed him, blood pouring all out of the guy. Don’t fuck with him, man.” I started dreaming about it and thinking about it and seriously planning it. I was all ready to do it and could have done it. I had the nerve. I had the shank, and I was in the process of choosing my victim when I got my date to get out.
Blame it on bureaucracy: somebody’s date with the shank was not to be.
In spite of the torments he suffered, Art, you would have to conclude, was blessed by life. This has to be in the end one reason why I’m so drawn to him. Yes, in lots of ways he was just plain lucky: witness the dumb moral luck in the foregoing. It’s exhilarating to see people escape disaster in some goofy and arbitrary fashion. But Pepper was also blessed by having a language. Not just one language, in fact, but two. He could play and he could talk. He did both things well enough, so gorgeously in fact, that despite all his flaws people came to love him and wish him well. And being loved he somehow managed to survive. On account of his honesty (or brilliant stab at it) he was granted a second life. (Art, writes Laurie Pepper in the afterword to Straight Life, “valued honesty above fame, even above art.” He was “obsessed with knowing and with being known and believed that a failure of honesty in his life would contaminate his soul and his music.”) Jeff had no human utterance and was cut out from the love side of things from the beginning. He was granted only a miserable smidgen of a life. Frail Watteau—not to mention Mozart—outstripped him by quite a bit. Who’s to say what’s fair or why things turn out the way they do?