Straight Life - Art Pepper [203]
One of the last times we took acid we went to a place called Sperling's in Santa Monica. A steak house. There was a piano player there, and I jammed with him, and then Christine came up for the next set to sing. Afterwards, we're getting ready to leave, and Christine's looking at me, telling me how marvelous I sounded, and I know she's waiting for me to tell her how she sounded, but I had listened to her while she was singing, really listened for the first time, and it came to me then that she wasn't good at all. Acid makes you incapable of lying. You see things as they are. Christine made the mistake of asking me. She wanted to be praised, too. She asked me and I told her, "Yeah, well, it was alright."
She got very upset, naturally, because she thought she was a singer. Up until that time I'd never said anything. I'd tried to pretend that she was cool and hadn't been in practice or something. This time I said, "You just don't sing in tune. You don't have a nice sound: it isn't vibrant enough; it isn't full enough. I don't really like your phrasing." Everything was bad, and I told her, and she flipped out and called me all kinds of names. She said, "Well, I can't do anything around you! You've just smothered me, musically and artistically! Whatever I do you don't like! You don't think anything a woman does is any good! You think all women are inferior to you! You've just ruined me! All you want is-you want all the praise!" I said, "If I do something well, naturally I enjoy being praised, but only when I do something right. I don't want anybody to praise me when I don't deserve it. I don't rank you because you're a girl or anything. You asked me about your singing. It's alright. You just don't move me that much. You're not really a singer." She said, "Oh, you motherfucker!" I said, "Why do you have to call me that? That's all you know is 'motherfucker.' Don't ask me things! You should know how you sing!" She said, "Well, everybody else says I sing good! All the jazz musicians I've sung with say that I really sing just like a horn and that I'm great!" I said, "Yeah, well, that's because they're putting you on. Maybe they want to ball you or want a ride someplace or want to borrow some money from you. It's bullshit. You don't really sing good."
Christine was very artsy. She painted abstract paintings. She'd go around and search through garbage cans and get old wires and make things out of them. Her father was a construction worker for a long, long time. He was an alcoholic. He died a while before I met her. She had two brothers; one was a dope fiend, a real heavy junkie and an armed robber; her other brother had been to prison for using marijuana but was never a criminal like Joe was.
She was raised in Torrance, a place where there were a lot of gangs. She'd grown up in a hard and violent atmosphere and always had a chip on her shoulder. She was one of the tougher girls around, and she wanted to be a boy, I think, because her dad probably liked the boys. Later she got married to a guy who played piano, just a fun-loving kind of guy, not very intense, so she started taking charge. She started dealing pot and doing the things the man usually does, and he relaxed and let her. That was her pattern and I fell into it, too.
Christine had a lot of violence in her and hatred, and it was hard enough before to restrain myself, but when I got around Christine, who was so much like that, I found myself giving way to it, too. When I was driving the car and somebody would honk at me or do something I didn't like in traffic, I'd stop the car, get out, and holler, "Motherfucker!" and threaten their lives. It's a miracle I didn't get killed. And when I did that, Christine thought I was great because I was so rugged and tough, and she'd rank her ex-old man for being a sissy and a punk. She called everybody sissies and punks.
After this thing happened about her singing, life with Christine really got