Straight Life - Art Pepper [107]
Diane and I had just had a terrible argument because all I did was sit in the house and nod out. Whenever I came to, I'd just cook up again. Sometimes the spike would be lying on the floor or still stuck in my arm, so when I woke up I'd have to clean it out, get it unplugged. I'd start cutting the light fixtures. I'd be cutting the cords and the plugs to get wires to stick into the spike to clean it. I would have ripped up anything in the house to unplug that needle. And there was blood running down my arms and burn marks all over the place from my cigarettes when I'd nod out-on the rugs, the couch, the chair, everything. Diane couldn't stand it, and we'd had this argument when I told her I had to go out and went into the bathroom to get cleaned up. Then I heard a noise. I ran out and saw the car pulling away. Diane had taken all my pants, every penny, my horns, and the car and she'd split, and there I was trapped on this huge hill.
She didn't come home for two days, went to friends' houses, her mother's, her father's, and she called me over and over but she wouldn't come home, and I was really sick. On the second day Mario dropped by and laid some stuff on me. When Diane came back I flipped out and threatened to kill her if she pulled that again.
Diane woke me one morning and said, "You have a record date today." I hadn't been playing. I hadn't been doing anything. I said, "Are you kidding? Who with? And where? And what?" She told me that she and Les Koenig from Contemporary Records had got together. The only way they could do it, they figured, was to set it up and not tell me about it so I'd be forced into it. They knew that no matter how strung out I was I would take care of business if people were depending on me. Even at my worst I was always that way. She told me that Miles Davis was in town, and they had gotten his rhythm section and set it all up with them. They were going to record with me that day: Philly Joe Jones on drums, Paul Chambers on bass, and Red Garland on piano.
I wouldn't speak to Diane at all. I told her, "Get out of my sight." I got my horn out of the closet, got the case and put it on the bed and looked at it, and it looked like some stranger. It looked like something from another life. I took the horn out of the case. When you take the saxophone apart there's the body piece, the neck, and the mouthpiece, and those three pieces are supposed to be wiped and wrapped up separately when they're put in the case. Evidently, the last time I'd played I'd been loaded and I'd left the mouthpiece on the neck. I had to clean the horn because it was all dirty. I had to oil it and make sure it was operating correctly. On the end of the neck is a cork, and the mouthpiece slips over that. I had to put a little cork grease on it. I grabbed the mouthpiece and pulled. It was stuck at first and then all of a sudden it came off in my hand. The mouthpiece had been on the neck for so long that the cork had stuck inside it, and on the end of the neck was just bare metal. It takes a good repair man four or five hours to put a new cork on. It has to set. It has to dry. It has to be sanded down. I didn't have time for that. I was going to have to play on a messed up horn.
And I was going to have to play with Miles Davis's rhythm section. They played every single night, all night. I hadn't touched my horn in six months. And being a musician is like being a professional basketball player. If you've been on the bench for six months you can't all of a sudden just go into the game and play, you know. It's almost impossible. And I realized that that's what I had to do, the impossible. No one else could have done it. At all. Unless it was someone as steeped in the genius role as I was. As I am. Was and am. And will be. And will always be. And have always been. Born, bred, and raised, nothing but a total genius! Ha! Ahahaha!
There was no way to fix the neck so I put