Straight Life - Art Pepper [244]
It was so atomized in Synanon. Most of the patterns of life are much too large for you to have any perspective on them, so you can never see them, but patterns do exist. In an enclosed environment like Synanon, everything becomes magical because everything is resolved. You are not too far away to see the pattern. You can always see how it comes out. There's no anonymity there. There's no chance meeting that has no meaning. There's nothing that has no meaning in an environment that's so enclosed. Everything was always interacting. I now work in a place of business, and I know nothing about the personal lives of the people I work with except for a couple of individuals, and they pick and choose very carefully what they tell me. I've worked there for two and a half years, which is almost as long as I was in Synanon, three years and three months, and I've found out nothing. I can only speculate. I know that this slob is an insane megalomaniac, but he does not supply me with any details and I do not have the Synanon game, where I can pry it out of him or where I can insult him for being seventy-five pounds overweight and a snob. So Synanon is really very educational
There was no privacy in Synanon. The only way you could be private, unless you were married or there a long time, was to lock the bathroom door. Even if you had a private room in a dormitory, people could enter without knocking. That's just the way it was. I was not interested in any men, though there was once a possibility that I would relate to Art. I was so hungry for affection and attention, because I'm a very sexual person, that I really considered Art, who, I felt, was a kindred soul somehow.
I can't remember all the details of our friendship because Art practically became a public person to me, but there were a number of times we played music together, for the dining room, and he... He helped me. He was prompting me in this silly music we were playing, so that I would come in right, because I was very frightened for some reason or other. And he was very supportive. But he used to always complain to me. He was a friend to me, and it was possible to empathize with how awful it was around there. And when we worked over in the Industries office, we really carried on at great length. The black humor in that office! It was unreal. And Art had a great sense of humor. He had this radio he kept at work; he had it set to the jazz station. Usually we worked the day shift, but sometimes we worked odd shifts, and Art had a note on the radio that said something like "How can you touch this radio without feeling terrible pangs of guilt?" And he had such a reputation for being able to hold his shit and never cop out to anything and such contempt for those people who did. But he liked to play that game, using the Synanon jargon for his own ends.
Art was funny, but he has a sadistic streak in him that apparently only comes out in how he treats himself and what he says about other people. Like, during the Puerto Rican episode in Synanon, when we had two or three hundred Puerto Ricans in Santa Monica, none of whom spoke English, he used to say things like "I'd like to get a grenade and pull the pin and just roll it down the bus aisle." That's a terrifying thing to say, and he said it with such relish. He expressed so much prejudice all the time that it was really shocking. I know he used to object to me because I'm gay, but one thing I've always known about him, which always knocks me out, is that he can learn from anybody. He really has respect for other musicians or for anybody who has any kind of skill. It's unbelievable that somebody who can express such chauvinistic, racist ideas and violent thoughts and jealousy