Straight Life - Art Pepper [266]
Well, the reason I want to get the book started is because I feel a real sense of urgency, because I feel something pulling at me, and I've been wanting to withdraw and hide. Just miserably unhappy. I can feel this presence. And the presence is death. Before I started talking into the tape recorder, I had nothing to say. I did not exist. I do not exist. My life is lived. My life is finished. But in talking about the past I see that then my life has meaning. So I want to tell my story. I think that's the only way I can give any meaning to my life, for having lived the life I've lived, is by having people know it. And get something out of it. Feel something from it.
During the next months we began to tape every few days. I became compulsive about it. Art started resisting again. At first I thought it was laziness or maybe unwillingness to go into certain aspects of his life, and that must have been part of it. But the real reason, I figured out in time, was that in this storytelling, too, he was an artist, and he demanded so much of himself when the tape started rolling, he might as well have been playing a solo in a recording studio. So, it was challenging, exhausting work with no payoff (but my approbation) and he tried to avoid it. Sometimes he'd get so loaded beforehand, he'd nod out in mid-sentence. I'd kick his foot and he'd start up again just like the Dormouse in Alice. Sometimes I bribed him with candy and ice cream (he was a lazy person, and I was willing to walk to the store). I'd beg him to talk for 15 minutes and sometimes keep him going for an hour.
I had an old electric typewriter. After a month or so I transcribed what I'd recorded. I read the transcript and realized that as he'd told the stories, he'd described nobody and nothing. I instituted truly brief sessions (which he came to a little more willingly) that were "fill-ins." I'd ask, "What was your mother like?" He'd give me a few minutes of telling de scription. "What about Patti?" A few more minutes. "Just one more: `Dicky Boy."' I'd go down a list of people and things and also try to clear up any confusions about events he'd already narrated. We continued that way from then on with both chronological narrative (which I hesitated to interrupt with requests for details) and fill-ins for description and clarification.
Les Koenig at Contemporary knew what we were doing and suggested that someone he knew at a skin magazine (I think it was Penthouse) might be interested in excerpting and paying for some part of it. I thought that what they might be interested in would be sex, so I got Art started talking about his sexual career. And because there was a possibility of publication, I began to edit that material (most of it wound up in the HEROIN chapter). The magazine offered $200 or something like that and it didn't seem like enough, so we decided not to go for it, but editing had begun.
The telling of the story took about two years, the editing took four or five. Art tended to tell an anecdote a little differently every time he told it, with different flourishes, sometimes with a different emphasis. So I got him to tell me some of the same stories over and even over again. Then I'd take my transcriptions of his different versions plus the transcriptions of the applicable fill-ins, pick out the best parts, cut redundancies and excess, clarify ambiguities by changing words and/or syntax, make or ask Art to make transitional sentences and then read it all back into the tape recorder, making sure I could "talk" the changed material with ease and that it reflected Art's speech patterns and rhythms. I'd make him listen. I'd ask him, "Does this sound like you?" After I typed out the edited story-or