The Professor and Other Writings (9 page)

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 and 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.

“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.

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:

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 Davis's
Kind of Blue)
that he thought too arty and studio-fied:

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.”

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: