Straight Life - Art Pepper [141]
In 1956, out of prison and still on parole, Pepper was given a second chance for happiness. He met his present wife, Diane. During the ensuing four years, he repeatedly stressed his debt to her for "keeping him straight."
At the end of 1957 Pepper could say with conviction, "My wife is the one who's made me happier than I've ever been in my life" (down beat, Jan. 9, 1958). "Now I really look forward to my older years. I used to be scared of growing old-but not now. Diane has done more for mein one year than all others did in my life's entirety."
"Whatever I may do in music from now on," he continued, "and whatever credit I may get for it belongs to her. She didn't give me back just my self-respect and career. Diane gave me back my life."
And a bare seven months ago, Pepper declared just as categorically (down beat, April 14), "Diane's understanding saved me; I owe so much to her. My marriage now is permanent and so very different from before. No words can describe what it means to me."
On Sept. 22, one month and three days before the altoist was left in a county jail tank to kick his habit "cold turkey," Diane Pepper was admitted to Orange County, Calif., general hospital in a coma induced by an overdose of phenobarbital taken to combat the withdrawal symptoms of heroin.
According to the report of two medical examiners at the hospital, numerous needle marks were found on her body. In the opinion of the examiners she "had been a heroin addict for a number of years."
Acting on an affidavit filed against her for narcotic drug addiction by Detective Sergeant Robert Manning of the Orange police department, Superior Court Judge Crookshank ordered her committed voluntarily to the California state hospital at Norwalk, Calif.
To detective Manning, it was an old and ugly story. He told of finding her slumped in the back seat of a car he had pulled over because, he said, he spotted two known narcotics violators in the automobile.
Rushed to the county hospital for emergency treatment, she later told Manning she had swallowed 30 phenobarbital tablets to ward off the pain of withdrawal. At 1/4 -grain each, Manning estimated, the dose totaled 71/2 grains of the drug, "enough to kill anyone else." Why hadn't the overdose proved fatal?
Said the detective. "There was still enough reaction from heroin in her system to keep her alive."
Diane admitted to Manning, the officer said, that she had been "turned on about two years ago by her husband." She added that she had "wanted to kick, but Art wouldn't go along with her."
Manning said she told him she was "shooting about four grams a day and that Art was shooting seven."
"That's around two spoons," observed the detective. "Quite a bit of junk."
The life of fantasy in which the heroin addict exists is productive of strange, often inexplicable thought processes. In the case of Art Pepper, deep feelings of anxiety and self-pity seemed to dominate his thinking. He was given to dark moods of depression, and the persistent delusion of persecution, like the drug his system subsisted on, was never far away. And the constant stream of optimistic thinking, running like a broken thread through his life as an addict, was merely self-delusion and a stark symptom of inner despair.
Yet, for all the fantasy and inner-life induced by heroin, Art Pepper at times exposed himself to brief and brutal flashes of reality, of true consciousness about what dependence on the drug meant to him as a human being and to those he yearned to love.
He knew what continued addiction meant. He knew it spelled death.
In the summer of 1956, when he tape-recorded a long and frank interview for this magazine on his mental illness, he said, "Of course, this (his 1954 conviction) makes me a two-time loser. If I goof again and get busted, I can get 30 to 40 years in prison under terms of a new federal law. . ."
During the same interview, he noted "I've been working with Jack Montrose.