The Professor and Other Writings (6 page)

But even if my fantasy about him is accurate, do I really need him to show me the way? I've gotten this far, after all, on my own two feet. Might it not be the case, terrors notwithstanding, that most people end up “walking towards death” in a fairly resolute fashion whether they plan to or not? One of the few times, paradoxically, I've found myself in apparent physical danger, when a bomb warning sounded deep in one of the Tube tunnels at Charing Cross and everyone had to evacuate in a hurry, I not only remained calm but felt peculiarly philosophical. The long-legged platform guard skedaddled at once—I can still see him bounding up the escalator steps two or three at a time—leaving a little group of tourists and children and old-age pensioners to scramble along after him. I ran about a third of the way up the escalator, panting horribly—it was one of those extra
long ones and for some reason wasn't moving—then thought:
oh fuck this, I'm too tired to run anymore! I don't care if I get blown up!
It was like the old French and Saunders skit: my leg bones have gone away. So I walked the rest of the way, more or less sedately, ultimately surfacing in Trafalgar Square. The crowds and the pigeons were bustling about as usual. No bomb went off, that week or later.

Silliest of all perhaps: whom do I hope to impress with my virile equipoise? My mother? My father? Siegfried Sassoon? Vera Brittain? Miss Coombs? None, I confess, has ever asked for such a proof of character. Blakey couldn't care less. She's staying with me till next September, working away in the downstairs room, where she's just figured out a way to type on a laptop while lying down. The dog loves it because he gets to spend the whole day snoozing on the bed with her while she muses. She's stuck with me all this dreary past year, though I'm not sure what she really thinks, either about my war obsession or the “walking towards death” stuff. She is interested in evolutionary psychology and selfish genes. Given such an intellectual framework, the First World War, like all genocidal conflicts, poses certain conceptual difficulties. How could it have been possible for millions of men to squander their DNA in such a reckless fashion? It's a stumper, I agree.

The other day we looked at an old photo in one of my books of a parade of volunteers, still dressed in their civilian clothes, marching down a London street in August 1914. War has just been declared. The men look tough and expectant; a military band is playing and women gaze down from balconies and windows. I had just realized to my great excitement that the narrow roadway in the picture (at first generic-looking Edwardian) was actually Villiers Street, the busy pedestrian thoroughfare that runs down from the Strand to Embankment. There on one side of the picture, clearly visible once you get your bearings, is the dark, somewhat dusty façade of Gordon's Wine Bar. It looks almost exactly as it does now.

I went there the first time, I recall, with Bridget, one late autumn
night in 1987, during the honeymoon phase of our cousinhood. (It was the same night, we discovered later, as the terrible fire at King's Cross.) Down steep wooden steps into a smoky medieval crypt where they served up our burgundy and plonk. Strange, as always, the curving back of time. One of the worst things about the First World War, from the vantage point of 2002, is that you think you've got to the end of thinking about it, then something makes you start all over again. This picture, for instance. I would prefer to move on and out—from gloomy 1918 especially—but I keep getting sent back to the beginning, as if stuck in some kind of Möbius loop. It's totally unlikely, as I said to Blakey, that my great-uncle could be one of the men in the parade, coming from the Midlands as he did. (The new Sherwood Forester battalions of 1914 and '15 formed up in Derby and Newark.) But that didn't keep me, as soon as Blakey went back to work, from screwing in my monocle and inspecting the men like a staff general. It was a tough job: I had first to remove all the cloth caps and boaters, add rifles and packs and khaki, then connect the fatal dots. And even then, all I could really see—staring crazily upward, as if already dazed by the fumes from the dugout brazier—was my own once-boyish face.

Art Pepper, 1960

WRITING THIS IN SAN FRANCISCO,
having just come back from San Diego and a heroin Christmas at my mother's. Not that I used any—there was definitely
not
any blowing, horning, tasting, fixing, goofing, getting loaded, or laying out. I've always been afraid of serious drugs, knowing my grip on “things being okay” was pretty tenuous already. Back in high school in the early seventies when everyone else was dropping acid, I refrained, mainly out of fear that I would be the inevitable freak-with-no-friends who would end up curled up for life in a psychotic ball, or else spattered in ribbony pieces, having flung myself through a plate-glass window. I also wanted to get perfect grades. No: the major dissipations this holiday were candy and coffee and buying things online with just one
click. Before I left, Blakey had given me some chocolate cigarettes, and at night, lying on my back under the covers with the laptop on my stomach—my mother had put me in the little upstairs room that used to be Jeff's—I would reach over and unroll one in a smarmy, bourgeois, sugar-dazed languor.

It was a heroin Christmas because I was reading the greatest book I've ever read: the jazz musician Art Pepper's 1979 autobiography
Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper
. It knocked my former top pick,
Clarissa
, right out of first place. As Art himself might say,
my joint is getting big just thinking about it
. I realize there may be a few lost souls who've never heard of him. Forget the overrated (and vapid-looking) Chet Baker. Art Pepper (1925–1982) was an authentic American genius. One of the supreme alto saxophone players of all time, Charlie Parker included. A deliriously handsome lover boy in the glory days of his youth. A lifelong dope addict of truly Satanic fuck-it-all grandeur. A natural writer of brazen, comic, commanding virtuosity. A proud long-term denizen of the California prison system. And now, no doubt, a tranquil if desiccated corpse. As his third and last wife, Laurie, notes in the epilogue to
Straight Life
, “Art…was afraid to be buried in the ground; he was afraid of the worms. But he was terrified of fire. So I had him interred in a crypt at the Hollywood Cemetery, like Rudolph Valentino. He would have enjoyed the location, the company, and that creepy word, crypt.” If my mother—now seventy-seven, curious, and freakishly adept at Internet navigation—ever looks me up on Google and sees what I'm writing now, I doubt if she'll be pleased.

Some of my liking, I confess, arises from sheer Southern California white-trash fellow feeling. Pepper was born near Los Angeles and spent most of his rackety life (as I have) on the West Coast. His father was a shipyard worker and nasty alcoholic. His mother, a dimwitted teenage bride, didn't want him and late in her pregnancy tried to abort him by leaping off a table. For what it's worth, my cross-eyed
stepsister Lee did something similar when
she
got pregnant at sixteen in San Diego in 1967: made my younger stepsister Linda (around ten at the time) jump off a sofa onto her stomach to make it “pop.” As with Mrs. Pepper's desperate
jeté
, the gambit failed to produce the desired effect. Lee had to have the baby in a Catholic place for unwed mothers and left it with an adoption agency. She later married Greg, a telephone installer from San Bernardino with a mammoth Nietzsche-style mustache, and became a compulsive gambler and grocery coupon–clipper before dying of drink at forty-six in 1996.

Unlike Art, however, I never mastered a musical instrument. (Plinking guitar accompaniments to “Love Is Blue” and “If I Had a Hammer”—grimly laid down as puberty loomed—don't count.) Pepper was a child prodigy. Though forgotten and unloved (his parents split up and basically dumped him), he got hold of a clarinet and taught himself to play. By the age of fourteen he was sitting in on clarinet and sax in jazz clubs all around L.A. After a short stint in the army—Pepper was stationed in London after the D-Day invasion—he joined the Stan Kenton Orchestra and traveled around the country as Kenton's lead alto. You can hear one of his very first recorded solos—brief, free, characteristically ductile—three breaks in after the famous scat-singing vocal by June Christy on Kenton's thunderous account of “How High the Moon” on the recent Proper Box compilation,
Bebop Spoken Here
.

After his first small-group recordings in the early fifties, discerning jazz fans recognized Pepper as a post-bop player of unusual beauty, subtlety, and warmth. The fact that he was white, like many other major West Coast jazz musicians, was not generally held against him. Astonishing to discover, especially given how few people outside music know much about him now, that he came in second after Charlie Parker in a 1951
DownBeat
readers' poll for Best Alto Sax Player Ever. Even the most partisan Bird fanciers acknowledged that Pepper's tone was the most ravishing ever heard before on alto. Parker received 957 votes and Art almost tagged up with 945.

But things got wrenching soon enough. Having begun as an alcoholic and pothead in his teens, Pepper got hooked on heroin while on the road with Kenton's orchestra in 1950. He had found—as he relates in his memoir—that junk was precious indeed, the only thing that made him feel “at peace” with his frightening talent and the unstable world around him.

In the mid-fifties Pepper was arrested numerous times on possession charges and spent over a year in various jails and rehabilitation centers. (He inevitably used his devious charm to hoodwink his dopey docs into thinking he had cleaned up, even though he never did; in jail he shot up all the time.) Out on parole and divorced from his first wife—she'd dumped him over drugs—he took up with a clingy, bouffant-haired Filipina cocktail waitress named Diane, whom he married in 1957. (He wasn't in love with her, he confesses; she was dumb and slovenly: “Diane—the Great Zeeeero.” “I just
wanted to have chicks I could ball when I wanted to ball.”) She too soon had a huge habit. (She became suicidal and died a few years later.) For a while Pepper still got paying gigs, and some of his best recordings—
Art Pepper Plus Eleven
,
Modern Art
,
The Return of Art Pepper
, and the sublime
Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section
(with Miles Davis's nonpareil late-fifties rhythm section)—were made while he was high. But after he and poor Diane began nodding out for days at a time, blissfully insensible to the strangulated yips of their miniature French poodle, Bijou, no one would hire him. He started doing solo hold-ups and boosts to keep them supplied, cruising past East L.A. construction sites and making off with unguarded power tools. He got caught with a condom full of dope after one of these farcical heists and when he refused to rat on his dealer, was sent to San Quentin, where he spent five brutalizing years.

Pepper was released in 1968—middle-aged, chapfallen, penniless, and still addicted, his numerous scars and track marks supplemented with a conglomeration of scary and absurd prison tattoos. He describes these droll insignias in a typically deadpan passage in his autobiography:

You can see some of the tattoos in the supergrotty ex-felon pic of him—a cadaverous Nan Goldin–style mug shot—on the cover of
Art Pepper: Living Legend
(1975). The LP should perhaps have been called
Semi-Living Legend
.

But the story has the teensiest little glimmer of a happy ending. After hitting the skids yet again, rupturing his spleen on stage (he'd started playing intermittently with the Buddy Rich band) and nearly dying, Pepper managed to get himself into Synanon, the celebrated Santa Monica drug-rehabilitation center and
Atlas Shrugged
–style beach commune. He lived there for several years in the early seventies and met Laurie, the young woman who became his third wife. He gradually cleaned up, at least partially, and began a heroic if truncated musical comeback. He made some new records, started touring again, and as quasi-rehabilitated
éminence grise,
gave jazz workshops at colleges and universities (even in his worst dope fiend days he had enjoyed tutoring young saxophonists). He played in Japan in the late seventies and developed there a new and enraptured cadre of fans. “My reception,” he notes in a revealing aside at the end of his memoir, “was overwhelming and frightening. I feel a strong obligation to return to Japan again and again and to justify, in my playing and recording, the devotion of the Japanese fans.” Accepting the love of others was always painful for him, but toward the end of his life he managed to open up a little bit.

He also began dictating
Straight Life
to Laurie, a kind and meticulous young woman who, along with being a fellow Synanon resident, had fortuitously trained as an anthropologist. (The title
Straight Life
—addict argot for living without heroin—is the name
of one of Pepper's musical compositions from the 1950s.) Once he'd laid out the basic narrative for her, a strange uncensored flow of childhood reminiscence, jazz and junk lore, obscene sexual anecdotes, and fearless, often japing self-revelation, Laurie, with Pepper's permission, asked some of his old bandmates, producers, drug dealers, prison cronies, and girlfriends to add their own insightful (and often unflattering) comments into the mix. The resulting feuilleton came out in 1979. It was hailed at once as a poetic masterpiece: a kind of riffing, scabrous, West Coast
Season in Hell
. As Whitney Balliett, doyen of American jazz critics, wrote at the time in
The New Yorker
, Pepper had “the ear and memory and interpretive lyricism of a first-rate novelist.” Balliett was right. But unfortunately the literary glory was short-lived. Though mostly off junk, Pepper continued to consume pills in great quantities and shot up, quite brazenly, with coke and methadone to the last day of his life. He died in Panorama, California, of an exploding brain in June 1982 at the age of fifty-six.

Which isn't to say I meant to get hooked on Art this holiday; I had tons of other things to do. I was worrying about shoulder-fired missiles and water supplies. I was trying, despite the exigencies of the season, to pay down my astronomical credit card debt. I was brooding over various intellectual and personal failings. I was also supposed to be writing a
London Review of Books
essay about Madame de Pompadour. The big exhibit of Pompadour pictures at the National Gallery was almost over and I was embarrassingly late with my piece. I'd invited my ex, Bev, to go with me to San Diego—Blakey was flying off to visit her dad—and so we ended up taking Bev's cushy, landau-like Ford Taurus, the tiny trunk of my two-seater being comically insufficient for everything that needed transporting: a Santa Claus–sized sackful of presents for my mother and the cats; numerous bottles of boutique olive oil for Tracy and Gilbert; the melancholy Charlie, small yet dignified in his plastic pet
carrier; piled-up copies of the
TLS
and the
New Yorker
; the computer and its many accoutrements; a space cult's worth of junk food (it's a ten-hour drive); the Goncourt brothers. I was hoping that Edmond and Jules would help me get somewhere with the Pompadour and all those ghastly Bouchers.