Straight Life - Art Pepper [267]
Many chapters fell together naturally. Others had to be built, with difficulty, out of lots of bits and pieces elicited over months. The chapter called STEALING chronicles a spiritual disintegration I had to work hard to understand and convey. It began to take shape when Art told me the tale of the armed robbery it ends with. That story troubled me terribly.
I made him tell it several times and then spent days and weeks nagging him about it, asking and rephrasing questions, explaining why I had to ask them. It was tortuous work for him to try to answer them, and it took time to really look at that day and then dredge up the ideas, influences, pressures, and acts that brought him to it. We both did our jobs so well that that remains my favorite chapter.
STRAIGHT LIFE was semi-complete by 1977, when Les Koenig called and said a fan was visiting in town and was really anxious to meet Art. Art was extremely reclusive; he said no, but Les told me the fan worked for the New Yorker. "Oh!" Says I, "Well! Send him right over!"
Todd Selbert sold advertising space at the New Yorker, and he was one of those fans who knew more about Art's career than Art did. Not surprisingly, Art warmed to him. Especially after Todd brought out of his briefcase a careful little grey paperback that he himself had published, a discography of all recordings Art had made. Art's Virgo-bookkeeper sensibilities were touched by the meticulous work that had gone into it. "Why did you do this?" he asked. "For the hell of it," Todd said.
We told Todd about our book, and he asked if he could take it back to New York with him. He took it to an editor at one publishing house who sent him to Ken Stuart at Schir- mer/Macmillan. Ken is a funny, wise, smart guy. He loved the book for all the right reasons and was ready to publish it. Why did I do what I next did? I don't remember. I sent it to every other publisher in New York. They didn't want it. We signed with Schirmer in August, 1978, and I asked for two years in which to complete the manuscript. We had to bring it up to date. I had to do the interviews.
I had shown the manuscript to a number of people while I was trying to sell it to someone other than Schirmer, and one woman friend suggested I interview some of the characters in the book. It had completely slipped my mind that this was supposed to be The Children of Sanchez. The oral histories of some of the characters in it were essential. And it became clear, too, that because Art's point of view was frequently so extreme, I needed other people's voices to balance hire-or just to bear witness. During the next year, I searched for the people, interviewed them, and edited the interviews. I interviewed all of them in person except for Alan Dean who turned up in Australia. He was kind enough to send spoken answers to my questions on a cassette.
As we neared publication, I got concerned with accuracy and started doing (sometimes purposeless, obsessive) research. I found out that Art was right about the kinds of rifles the San Quentin guards were issued during his stays there; I learned the spellings of some arcane and/or obsolete pharmaceuticals, and picked up a lot of Chicano slang. I dug through all the old down beats at UCLA and copied articles having to do with Art. I managed to get a look at a copy of Art's rap sheet. That was invaluable. Using the rap sheet and Todd's discography, I was able to get very clear about when things must have happened and to put them in their right order.
Ken told me, years later, that after the book was finished, The Powers That Be at Schirmer wanted him to cut the book to half its length. He didn't do that. He sent it to an outside editor who cut almost nothing of Art's part. She cut most of the other people's interviews down a bit. I agreed with most of her changes; I was editing, myself, right down to the wire. Ken never touched the book except, once, to restore something I had cut.
The book came