Straight Life - Art Pepper [243]
I've always been a perfectionist. I'd get mad at groups I was playing with and, thinking only of the music, if somebody goofed I'd turn around and look at them or say something to them on the stand right in front of the audience, and they'd get angry at me because it's not professional to do that, but I couldn't help it. By playing these games and ridding myself of these feelings I found I became much more tolerant and less quick to rank somebody on the stand. And the more games we played, the better the music was that we played together-those that were left. Hahahaha! No. They all came back, and it was a marvelous experience.
Tom Reeves was responsible for organizing the musicians and setting up these games. Tom was one of the gurus. He was very talented in a lot of things and really in nothing. He was a writer, a great game player, he had a real command of the language, and he played a little drums. He was a good tribe leader, too. He was a heavyset guy and wore a beard-I'm sure to make him look wise so the kids would look up to him. He was pretty far-out, and I used to think he was a real outsider until I discovered that he was more hooked on the Synanon system than the weakest woman.
We'd made some tapes of the musical games and of some really wonderful performances we'd done, and Tom kept these tapes. Then we had a glut raid, and afterwards the regents called a whole bunch of old-timers together and hauled them up in the dead of night to Synanon City at Tomales Bay, to Chuck, the old master. He wanted to play some games with them. While they were there, Chuck decided he'd have them all shave their heads to stop the decadence, to tighten their morales. But he did give them a choice, and I think there were a few people that had some balls and declined. Most of them went for it. Tom was one of the sheep. And later on, when Jack Hurst and Chuck Dederich began talking about jazz, saying it was decadent and evil, as was rock, Tom Reeves, all on his own, took these beautiful tapes we had made and destroyed them.
(Karolyn April) I went to Synanon, well, to be perfectly honest, I was trying to pursue my lover, Sherry. She had broken up with me. We had lived together and used for about two and a half years, and she had decided to quit being a call girl to support her habit. I ran out of government loans from the university to support my habit and there I was, in a very numbed state of mind, unable to think of anything else to do. I couldn't conceive of going back to the life that I'd led, even though the woman I'd lived with before was willing to have me stay with her. I could not do it. And I was in a state of true insanity, I think, and I was almost paralyzed. I was very unhappy. I was ripe for a mental institution, which is what, essentially, Synanon was. The only thing I knew to do was to follow Sherry, which is what I did. I don't think she actually minded it. She's a person who only has relationships for a couple of years at a time, but she doesn't really want to break off with people that she cares for, so she was kind of glad to see me.
The Synanon of that time was bad and good ... and bad ... and good. In some ways it was really good because you could be really crazy in Synanon without having to be in a mental institution. I personally had a real breakdown there after I had a serious bout with Hong Kong flu. I was very weak, and I came out of it having active hallucinations. All kinds of peculiar psychic and emotional experiences. So I was crazy in that environment, and in spite of the impossible rules everybody around you loves you. They all hate somebody-that presence that is so-tyrannical-but they all love each other.
There's another thing that you know there, that nothing's going to stay the same. You can't depend upon the status quo, no matter how good you think you are. You can never do it all right. There's always that vindictive spirit that goes about that environment,