Straight Life - Art Pepper [57]
Our regular driver was back with our regular bus trying to get it ready, and this driver we'd just hired didn't know what to make of us. He was fascinated. He made an announcement. He was going to radio ahead for help. We said okay and kept on playing, and all of a sudden we just found ourselves marching out the door of the bus. It was freezing cold but we had our coats on and our mufflers, and before we knew it there were twenty guys out there, with horns, marching down the highway. There were farms and stuff, you can imagine, cows and dogs and things. We're going down the highway playing marches.
June Christy was a pom-pom girl strutting down the road. She was a cute little thing with light hair and a little, upturned nose. She had a lot of warmth and she was sexy in that way, no standout shape, but she was nice and everybody liked her, and she had crinkly marks around her eyes from smiling a lot. Her husband was Bob Cooper, who played tenor with the band. He was very tall with blonde hair and the same crinkly thing around his eyes. People used to wonder why she had married him, being June Christy. People thought that she and Stan might get something going, and there were a lot of guys that dug her, but she married Bob, and I understood it. He was one of the warmest, most polite, pleasantest people. He was completely good if you can imagine such a thing, just a sweetheart, and he got embarrassed easily, and he blushed a lot. And he used to drink with June; he would look after her; they were a great pair. And they were marching down the road.
Ray Wetzel was marching, a fat funnyman, always laughing and smiling. He had a lot of jokes and little comic routines he used to do, and he was a wonderful trumpet player with a beautiful sound. Shelly Manne was out there in a big Russian overcoat with a fur collar and a big babushka or whatever you call it on his head. Shelly's like the picture "What Me Worry?", and he's always making jokes, and he doesn't drink, and he doesn't smoke pot: he's naturally high. He's playing the snare drum, playing wild beats and walking like he's crippled. Bart Varsalona joined in playing his bass trombone, another comedian.
Bart was a sex freak, and he had an enormous joint, one of the biggest I've ever seen. Occasionally on the road he'd invite some of the guys down to his room, where he'd have some real tall showgirl-hustler. He'd haul out his joint and slam it on the table top, and then he'd have the chick do a backbend or something and give her head while we smoked pot and drank and watched. A lot of the guys in the band considered themselves real cocksmen, but I'll have to admit that the kings-for pure downright sex and the number of freaks they knew in each town-were Bart and the bass player, Eddie Safranski. And Eddie was there, too, on the highway.
Al Porcino was up in front, a marvelous trumpet player, a nice-looking guy about six feet tall. In his room sometimes he'd take Ray Wetzel's pants and put them on, the pants from his uniform. He'd fill himself up with pillows and dance in front of the mirror. A couple of times he even went out on the stand like that. He always wanted to be a band leader. He had a book full or arrangements, and wherever he went, all his life, he'd get guys together and rehearse them like a big band.