The Professor and Other Writings (7 page)

I also threw in an unopened copy of
Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section
, picked up on a whim a few evenings earlier at the Stanford Shopping Center. (I once spotted Condoleezza Rice there, smoothly circumnavigating the potted ferns and plashing fountains, a well-dressed zombie on a mission.) I'd found it—somewhat surprisingly, along with the paperback of
Straight Life
—in one of those depressing HEAR CD stores, so evocative of the late nineties U.S. economic boom, where you put on headphones and sample various glossily repackaged “classics” while sipping on your Starbucks. Some poor drone in the stock department must have let these hipster items in by mistake. I'd been on a private little jazz kick for a while, and had in fact just finished Ashley Kahn's absorbing history-of-a-date,
A Love Supreme: The Making of John Coltrane's Signature Album.
Trane was a nice sheets-of-sound antidote to the ormolu, love nests, and scheming courtiers of the ancien régime. Yet despite having a workable assortment of Mulligans and Bakers and Konitzes, I was also feeling vaguely dissatisfied with the West Coast “cool” side of my collection. Wasn't it a bit thin and dilettantish? And wasn't the whole school, pre-and post-Getz, in need of (my) reconsideration? I had known about Art Pepper vaguely; but as I riffled through the pages of his autobiography and saw he was writing about Oceanside and Norwalk and Huntington Beach—all those exit signs just up the freeway from my birthplace—I suddenly decided, with a certain prim sententiousness, that
I'd have to explore his work
.

There was also, I admit, the lesbian factor: I found him madly attractive. I'd never seen a picture of Art before, and here he was,
on both CD cover and book, in the sort of dapper outfit that must have driven dykey lady–jazz lovers of the fifties insane with covetousness. He stood outdoors, leaning up against a eucalyptus tree, in a crisp open-necked pinky-white Coronet-style shirt (windowpane check) and a gorgeous pale tweed sports jacket dotted with tiny delicate flecks of brown and black. He held his alto gently in the crook of one arm. He smiled faintly at me—a low-rent Lucifer—and was humming quietly.
You'd be so-o-o-o—nice—to come home to!
He reminded me at once of those hunky young hard-drinking sailors, packed into fresh clean whites and reeking of Old Spice, whom my mother somewhat recklessly dated before she finally got together with Turk in 1967. When I wasn't riding my skateboard in front of our apartment, I was always jumping all over them in a passion.

In
Straight Life
Pepper is frank—and hilarious—on the subject of his looks. Detailing his stay in an expensive detox sanatorium in Los Angeles in the mid-fifties, he recalls prinking about in the nude after getting some huge shots of morphine to mitigate the symptoms of heroin withdrawal:

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 festive. 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: