Straight Life - Art Pepper [201]
I didn't even want to play at that point. I had more important things to do. But I was there, and I had the horn, and people ... It was an obligation. So then it became the same old thing. The battle started. I had to play because I couldn't be a coward. I had to show the other people up and prove that I was better than them. I got out that old, silver soprano, that relic, and I had to play it as if it were a five- or six-hundred-dollar horn in perfect condition. And I had to cut all these young guys who'd been practicing and working and were really out to play and especially to cut anyone like me.
I played great, and afterwards I was basking in this little adulation I had to have, always felt I had to have. And for a while I was happy. And Christine was happy because she was getting the overflow: she must be pretty important to have me because I'm so far-out. That's the way they think. It came time to leave, and we walked out.
First there's the contact with your old lady. She's telling you how great you were, and you still feel good. But then, like someone on a rollercoaster, I was hit by a depression far greater than the high I'd just experienced. We approached this Anglia, this beat little English car that was just as phony as the whole life I'd led. It had a red racing stripe on it, but the car could barely do forty with its little, dinky wheels. I got in, and Christine said, "You want me to drive?" The sun's shining, and I look around and see the people on the street. A black and white comes by with the rollers; they're looking at us. And then everything came back at me. Reality came back. I started feeling my body and worrying about it and I got this taste in my throat that I always got when I took acid. I could taste my brains in my throat.
Christine started driving. "Oh, Art, fill my bottle." I looked down at the half empty gallon of Red Mountain sitting in a rumpled paper bag and smelled the stench of stale wine we'd spilled before, so many times, on the floor of the car. She said, "How `bout if we go over to So-and-so's?" Her eyes were just crazy, and she wanted to go again. She wanted to go to this guy's house in Venice. She wanted me to play the piano for her so she could sing. So I would tell her, "Yeah, you sound great." So somebody would tell her that. She had to have that. All I wanted was to be left alone. I didn't want to have to generate all this thing so Christine could get her "fix" for singing, but I had to go with her to Venice and I felt really bad.
We bought another gallon of wine and started pouring it down with uppers. We got to the guy's house and I asked him, "Do you know of anybody that's got any smack? Do you know of anything?" He said, "Well, I know a guy that's got some bottles." He meant methadrine. I said, "Alright, man. We don't have any money." He said, "I'll spring for a couple bottles." I said, "We don't have a 'fit either." He said, "I'll see if I can borrow one." He left, and while we're waiting in the pad I started looking around.
There were two apartments above a market. His wife lived in one, and in this one he had an electric piano and books and pipes and paintings. And he had a daughter there that must have been around fifteen, sixteen, and I think he was balling the daughter as well as his old lady. The girl had on a little silk kind of thing that just fell away at her breasts.