Straight Life - Art Pepper [10]
Mr. Parry didn't play very well, but he was a nice guy, short and plump with a cherubic face, warm, happy-go-lucky. He had sparkling little eyes. You could never imagine him doing anything wrong or nasty or unpleasant. He invited me to his house for dinner a couple of times and I met his wife. She liked me, and they had no children of their own, so she would send me candy that she made. Mr. Parry was like another father to me, and I used to love talking to him. That's what our lessons were. None of them had anything to do with technicalities or the learning of music. It was just talking, having somebody to talk to. And I never had to practice. Just before Mr. Parry came I'd get my clarinet out and run through the lesson from the previous week. He'd think I'd been practicing the whole time. When I did play I played songs. I played what I felt. I didn't want to read anything or play exercises.
My father lived nearby. He was working as a longshoreman, and he lived with a woman named Nellie as man and wife. He never married her. He'd visit us and pay the bills. When it was time for school he'd give my grandmother money to get me a few clothes. He drank all the time, too. He used to get mean sometimes; he'd get loud and talk on and on and recite "The Face on the Barroom Floor" and all kinds of weird things.
After I started playing the clarinet my father would come and take me down to San Pedro to the bars. I've been there lately and the place is all cleaned up, but at that time, down by the waterfront, the whole area was nothing but bars, and there were fishermen, Slavonians, Italians, Germans-almost every nationality known was in those bars. A few had entertainment, a beat strip show, but most of them were just places guys went to hang out and talk. They weren't the kind of bars women would go in or that hustlers were at. They were men's bars, where they'd drink and talk about fishing and the waterfront and driving winches and their problems with management, to talk about the union. They were real tough guys; they were all my dad's friends. He would take me to several different bars, sit me up on the bar, and make me take out my clarinet and play little songs like "Nola" and "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" and "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," "The Music Goes Round and Round," "Auld Lang Syne." The guys would ask for other songs, and I'd play them, and they'd listen. My father would stand right by me and stare at them and nod his head-like they'd better like it or he'd smack 'em in the mouth! And he was a big guy, and he'd be drunk. I got the feeling that they did like it because I was his boy. They liked boys. I was his boy: "That's Art's boy. He plays nice music." "Yeah, nice boy. Play that thing, boy!" They'd pat me on the back. They'd grab my arm and shake my hand-almost hurt my hand they were so rough: "You just keep it up, boy. You don't want to be like us." I was like their child. All their children. "You keep that up and you won't have to do like we do." And they would have fingers missing, and some guys would have an arm gone. Things would drop on them and they'd lose legs, feet, fingers. I could get away from that and be respectable and not have to get dirty and get hurt and work myself to death. And so they'd drop a dollar bill in my hand or fifty cents or a silver dollar. I'd end up with fifteen, twenty dollars just from these guys, and my dad never took the money from me. He said, "That's yours. You earned that." I always felt scared before I played, but after I did it I was proud