Straight Life - Art Pepper [251]
At the end of the trip, we gathered in the Woodshed again. The ballroom downstairs was packed with people waiting for us. Somebody went down and gave word to the house that the trip was breaking. I had seen it happen. I had played for it with the band, but this was different. We came down in our robes, all of us kind of funky, all the faces swollen from crying and from not sleeping, and we looked really angelic, really beautiful, so pure and real. Everybody was touched by love, even the guides, and we walked down into the house, and the band started playing, and everyone rushed onto the floor and grabbed us and held us, and everybody was crying, and there was such a closeness. And it wasn't a sexual thing. It was just a real honest thing of love.
In Synanon your mind was completely free of the fears people outside use up their energy worrying about. You didn't have to think about food or rent or doctor bills. You didn't have to worry about what you were going to do when you got old, if you got ugly, if you lost a leg. The first tribe leader I had, Bob Holmes, had kidney trouble. He'd had an operation and the only way he could live was through a dialysis machine. Those machines are hard for people to get the use of, but because he was in Synanon and because of the money and power and influence Synanon has, Bob had access to a dialysis machine each week, as he needed it. If he'd been on the streets, living in some beat shack in Cleveland or Watts, he would have died. So all you had to do was accept these changes and periodic humiliations and you had nothing to worry about.
As far as sex went-Laurie and I went to the guestroom two or three times a week, and it was great. When we went we'd really be ready to make love; it was a place of love. Every now and then we'd get an extra day or an extra night-somebody had canceled-and we'd just have a ball. There was never once that we didn't enjoy it and didn't make love. Oh, a couple of times we had an argument for some ridiculous reason or other and didn't go, but the rest of the time-and this was for two and a half years, twice a week, every week-never once was there a failure. Never once was I unable to get an erection. Never once did I not come. Never once did she not come. It was perfect.
Sometimes I wonder if I had been able to go to Synanon as a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old, I wonder what might have happened with my life. Well, everything was going fine. I was blowing. Every now and then somebody would come in from the outside to play. Phil Woods dropped by, one of the greatest alto saxophone players living. He's a fan of Charlie Parker's. He's such a fan that when Bird died, Phil Woods got ahold of Chan, Charlie Parker's old lady, and he wooed her and wooed her and finally he married her. And he got Bird's horn when he married her. I don't know if he married her because he loved her or because she was Bird's old lady or to get the horn or what.
Hahahaha! They were together for a long, long time. He's a great player. I loved blowing with him, and I played beautifully, and I realized then than that was what I had to do. I had to play. But,