Straight Life - Art Pepper [2]
He had made the big time: San Quentin. Pepper was caught stealing to support his habit, devoting his most creative energies to planning heists, many of which could have been better executed by Laurel and Hardy. (The most satisfying moment of his life, he says, was a successful heist.) The prison sequences in Straight Life are among the best I've ever read, vivid and impassioned and stubbornly convinced that the moral life of the yard-where a rapist is treated with contempt, but a gang rape proves a gang's bravery; where a rat is lower than a child molester-is superior to that of the outside. His language and vision superficially resemble that of Gary Gilmore in Mailer's The Executioner's Song: both men are proudly homophobic, murderous on the subject of informers, indifferent to the outcome of their crimes, vain, and convinced of their own courage and moral impunity. In San Quentin, Pepper starts thinking "how great it would be to kill someone and really be accepted as a way out guy," but he always, sometimes through the intervention of friends, managed to keep some control; several acquaintances explain it as cowardice. He also turned increasingly racist in jail, a widespread phenomenon that in a particularly lucid moment he traces to the prison system itself. (Paradoxically, this in no way mitigated his conviction that the great jazz players and, indeed, the moral giants of the music were predominantly black.) Upon his release, he spent time in North Beach in San Francisco, seething to kill blacks; he talks about organizing a white vigilante committee "who'd stick up for the white race." Soon enough he returned to heroin to alleviate the hatred over which he had no more control than he did his sexual obsessions.
Finally, at the nadir of his life, he retreated to Synanon. The Sixties were in full gear, and he wore an earring and hit the rock joints with his tenor; but his life was empty and even his mother refused him lodging. The description of life at Synanon is as uncompromising as the jail sequences; he is alternately damning and grateful. The best thing to happen to him there was meeting Laurie, who became his wife, lover, mother, babysitter, manager, editor, and co-author.
Art left Synanon in-1971. Four months later, his father died-a release, Laurie speculates, that may have made it easier for Art to think of himself as a man. He started working as a musician again, playing casuals and clinics, touring colleges, sitting in. But his ambivalence about music remained. In 1977, three events, in Laurie's estimation, forced him to reappraise his gift and his life: In March, he played a concert series in Tokyo with Cal Tjader, and the crowds cheered him as though "he might have been the Beatles"; in June he toured the East Coast for the first time as a leader, playing two dates at the Village Vanguard; in September, he got busted after a car accident that almost killed him. Laurie recalls, "Art discovered then that he couldn't go `home' again to jail. There was no honor, no welcome there. All his buddies were dead. He was an old man. He wasn't a bigshot. He went through a long spell of depression, aggravated by sobriety and by Les Koenig's death in November. When he went back to Japan with his own band in February of 1978, he'd just about decided to be a musician. Galaxy signed him in September. That did it. That and the publication of Straight Life."
Pepper's sudden reappearance in 1975 had been something of