Straight Life - Art Pepper [200]
Christine went to see a guy she knew in Culver City and got some acid to sell. It was liquid with a purple hue to it. You'd put a drop of it on a piece of paper and sell that: To take it, you'd put the paper under your tongue; the acid would go into those little vessels there. You couldn't see what you were getting but it wiped you out. The first time we'd taken it, at the party, we were drunk and had been taking Dexamyl Spansules and had smoked pot. The second time we decided we'd take it sober.
We got up in the morning and took the acid. Then we got in the car. They were having a jam session at a club in Gardena; a waitress I knew invited us to come. I figured we'd better have a drink. We bought a bottle of Red Mountain.
At first the acid didn't affect us at all. While we were driving we had to be cool and concentrate, and we saw people dressed up to go to church-that whole thing of Sunday morning. Then we stopped the car in the parking lot, got out, and walked into this place where you couldn't tell if it was dark or daylight, where there were all these people who looked as if they'd been going for days, all the chicks laughing and everybody high on pot and junk and juice and acid. There was a jazz band playing, and it was as if we'd entered Dante's inferno. The acid took over.
We didn't have much money left but the waitress said,
"Don't worry about it. I'll take care of you." She brought us free drinks. We started talking to the people at our table, a guy and two sexy girls in low-cut dresses. At the time I didn't have a horn; I think I'd hocked my tenor so I was playing an old, silver soprano sax I'd borrowed from Christine's brother. The girls saw the case and said, "What's that?" I told them I was a musician and they started giggling and flirting with me. I looked at Christine and at that moment something snapped in my mind. I looked at these empty-headed women. I looked around me at all these crazed, laughing people hiding in the darkness on a Sunday afternoon, trying to deny the existence of any reality, and I realized that I was a part of it. I was doing the same thing I had done as a kid, searching for something and never stopping, never being satisfied with anything, always thinking something wild was happening in the next block or the next house. What I was doing with Christine was just the same. We couldn't possibly stop and relax and enjoy each other or enjoy life because we were so busy trying to find the wild things that we thought we were missing out on. After paying all the dues that I'd paid-prison and everything-here I was past forty, with my pierced ear and my beard, and I was still running. I thought of all the people that I knew, that I started out with. They're all living out in the valley with nice homes; and they have two or three kids, they're grandparents, they have nice clothes and cars and money in the bank, they're into businesses; and they long, long ago stopped this kind of life. I looked at Christine and saw that strained look on her face: she looked like