VENICE: PART THREE
Art Pepper in the
vacant lot next door
Once, years later, when, on the phone, I was upbraiding
some friend of Art's for giving him drugs, the fellow, full of guilt and self-pity,
pleaded, "You know how he is!"
This was his excuse. It
didn't stop me from hanging up on the guy (He wanted money from me for what Art
had gotten from him; he didn't get it).
But I knew how Art was.
Chinese water torture. It
varied in intensity, but it was steady, his pleading, a continuous
entreating. With importuning he
was like those people who take flimsy balloons of various shapes and colors and
twist them into animals, giving begging different interesting shapes, so that
you never quite got bored enough to stop hearing it. With some inward ear you heard it, the coax, the wheedle,
his inflated need.
So
he kept bugging me. "Please
let me move in." And
circumstances were changing in ways that made it seem like a better and better
idea.
Bob
and Nicky weren't really paying him.
They gave him room and board, the use of a car, and "walking around
money," just like Synanon, maybe 20 bucks a week for working a twelve hour
day -- processing deliveries and doing the books.
Through
gossiping with his friends down the street (I'll get to them later) Art was
inspired to apply for what at that time was "ATD." Aid to the Totally Disabled. Welfare.
At
first, because he had cirrhosis and that hernia, he applied based on his
supposed physical incapacity. When
that was denied, he returned and screamed at a psychiatrist, convincing him
that he was crazy. He came over
and told me about it:
Art
I scared the guy to death.
(beaming, reliving it)
He was just cowering. I really raged.
I told him that I knew they wouldn't give me anything because I'm
white. I raged and raged. I was walking around the room, man, the
psychiatrist was practically hiding under his desk, just trembling, you should
have heard me. I told him that the
black people get foodstamps and everything, but because I'm white…
(proud of himself)
I really scared the guy, and what I said, that was all
true.
(he shakes his head,
awed by the realities of life)
It just shows you, man. There's nothing like the truth.
There's nothing like the truth. Art was crazy. He'd proved it with his life. He got the money. Enough money to enable him to leave the
Deal's. This money he got for his
insanity was supposed to prove to me he was good husband material.
My
greatest weakness is my sense of humor.
Art knew that and knew I'd be impressed with his story, how he told
it. Also, he told me he would pay
the rent, my rent. I could stop
working (which I did do, for a while, eventually) and just write the book. That was really appealing -- as was
Art's desire to take care of me.
He was an old-fashioned man who longed for marriage and whose pride
required he be the protector and breadwinner.
The
stumbling block was drugs. But I
had a naïve belief that methadone maintenance might keep him out of trouble (I
wasn't entirely wrong). I told Art
that if he'd get on the VA methadone program and stop smoking I would live with
him. He complied. (The smoking thing lasted a month or
two). And so my muse moved in with
me, and he didn't take up as much space as I'd feared.
I
only now realize, remembering the circumscription of his movements, his
relative stillness, the seeming narrowness of the area he occupied, that he
must have gotten his manner of cohabiting from his jail experiences He did unto
others as he would have them do.
He stayed out of my way.
And yet, he seemed to delight in my manner of being all over the place. It amused him to watch me sprawl. He despaired of and chuckled at my
untidiness. I'd constantly disrupt
our patterns which, once they were created, he clung to like the spinster
bookkeeper he partly was. He
thought I was a lot of fun. He
hardly listened to my chatter but said he didn't have to. He liked the sound of my voice. He already knew I was incredibly smart,
educated, classy. He told me I was
beautiful. Reader, he loved me.
Art's
pastimes were walking, reading the newspaper, watching tv. He liked to have the news on on the
radio all the time, but I wouldn't tolerate that. He was passionate about sports, baseball, basketball,
football, tennis, and followed them all avidly. Sports talk was the way he was able to communicate with
other men, with strangers.
I've
always been impressed with the careful code-like naming of players, the citing
of recent or ancient exploits, analyses of games or of a team's status and
chances. These rituals seem to me
like the sniffing of privates dogs perform, a formality that forestalls
conflict and promotes good will -- though not necessarily
friendship. Art's friendships with
men were usually based on favors they did for him, often, but not always,
having to do with drugs.
For
Art, with women, intimacy came easily.
He talked at once about how he felt, his physical problems and emotional
pain. He complained and assumed
right off they'd care. They
usually did and confided in him, too.
And he was interested.
Fascinated.
I've
never had a lot of friends. I
think I've said I'm pretty exclusive and reclusive. . So was
Art. His objection to my few friends was
that I liked them. He was
jealous. I objected to his
friends when they gave him drugs.
So,
when he wasn't lying on the bed or out walking, Art was up the street drinking
coffee out of a big plastic thermal mug at the house of his friends, Ann and
John.
Back
in the fifties, John had been a cop in the LAPD, a narc. Lenny Bruce had been
John's personal snitch, and they were, in an odd way, pals. Lenny had sent John little notes and
tips and collages. I interviewed John at length, and he
told me "Lenny would give up absolutely anyone to keep from having to go
to jail." Lenny'd told him,
"I'll give you Honey [Lenny's wife].
She's holding right now." I heard about the bust from which John finally
couldn't extricate him.
"As
for Art," John said, "he wasn't paranoid." There had been a police policy
to harass Art Pepper and end his career.
John said he'd had no part in it and had even let a phoned in tip go
by.
John
had been impressed by how the junkies he busted talked about heroin, how he saw
the same people again and again, intelligent people, ruining their lives. He had to find out why. He did, got hooked, got busted, went to
jail -- with people he'd sent up.
That worked out okay. He'd
been cool, and everybody liked him.
Ann
had been a big Art Pepper fan. She and a girlfriend followed him around in the
old days, finagled a friendship by giving him money, bailing him out of
jail. She knew Art well, and I quoted
her a lot in STRAIGHT LIFE.
Ann
was a junkie with a rare gift. She
could function while kicking. If
she couldn't get a fix, she kept on living, working. She'd been a bookkeeper and, for a time, personal assistant
to a movie star (Jennifer Jones) -- dealing with her correspondence, social
calendar, etc. I never found out
how Ann wound up literally in a hole in Venice: Their little
rented shack was down below the sidewalk in a ditch, I figured it must have
to do with love. She told me she met John
when he'd busted her, and while she was in jail she thought of him. Eventually, they got together.
They
lived on welfare and on methadone maintenance, courtesy of L.A. County. They got high doses and sold the extra
(plus some pills and marijuana).
I
first saw them one afternoon as I crossed the alley on my way to the
Bakery. They were doing
surreptitious business with Art.
He tried to introduce me, but I only grunted, believing (ha ha) that they
were the source of my problems with him.
We lived in Venice for four years, and eventually, they became my
allies. They kept Art out of
trouble and content with an extra dose a couple times a week. They refused to indulge him in anything
extra.
Their
two room house had the kind of lighting dopefiends prefer, none. The windows were all heavily draped,
and the place had the humid stench of rooms slept in and always closed -- and filled with stray animals: Thirteen German
Shepherds and a couple cats. John
and Ann had big hearts, but their front yard was three feet deep by 10 feet
wide, so the dogs stayed in the house and stayed agitated. All conversations were continuously
interrupted by barking and by shouts to the dogs to shut up.
The
front room was stuffed with a bed, a lawn chair, a coffee table, and tv. Art and Ann and I (when I visited) sat
on the bed. John, fat, pale,
sweating, bespectacled, bearded, sat on the chair in a grey dashiki Ann hade
made for him -- with blue piping at the neck and sleeves.
In
their right hands they held cigarettes.
In their left, the bottomless hot coffees. They told stories about junkies they knew or knew of (it's a
small world), and speculated by the hour about what was going on in the news --
often getting the stories wrong in some essential details, so that what was
undoubtedly already corrupted as to accuracy, became totally distorted in their
nevertheless energetic and serious discussions. For me, it was Alice's tea party, with these three arguing
the fine points of events that hadn't happened, government policies that hadn't
been enacted. Too bad for Art,
John hated sports.
Every object in their house was hideous to me. Yes, I'm a terrible terrible snob. The artwork -- rampaging, dreamlike,
detailed jailhouse unicorns. Nasty
little figurines with silly slogans on their bases. I think they had one of those coffee tables made out of a
horizontally cut tree showing its whorls through a thick, permanently sticky
varnish glaze. Everything was cute
and homey and in surprising and distressing colors, and the clutter, dust, and
doghair were overwhelming.
I
knew Art was safe with these two sweet souls. Better with them than scouting around looking for trouble
with his less settled friends who had a way of dropping by and getting my cold
shoulder.
Like
Mack Lubow.
Art
knew him from the joint and Synanon.
He was a lumbering, dead-eyed, sub-verbal giant. I berated Art for days, after I came home one afternoon
to find Art entertaining this character in my house. And Art didn't even try to pretend he didn't know what I was
talking about. He apologized.
Mack's
ultimate fate seemed to me poetic.
He overdosed sitting on a toilet.
When they found him he was still alive, but his ass was gangrenous from
lack of blood (he must have weighed 300 pounds), and it had to be removed. He died a few years later.
At
the time of Mack's surgery, I saw this bad end Mack came to as a
cautionary tale for Art. I made no
comment at all on it, except an appropriate, "Oh, my God!" I knew any pontificating or jokes from
me would only divert Art's attention from the real story which was good enough
on its own.
No
story would have made Art change his ways, as I learned later. He was born missing the part that can
calm down, and he learned really early, at 8 or 9, to take medicine (Phenobarbital)
for relief for what was, to him, intolerable discomfort. Maybe he could have been taught, with
love, to deal with it. There had
been no teachers, and there was not enough love.
It
happened, he was born with genius, too, and a taste for sensation, an eye, an
ear for beauty. He worshipped
beauty, and his responses were so childlike, so full of awe, that what he felt
could overcome you, too, if you were with him, listening to music, seeing
something lovely. His appreciation
(weak word) when it happened (rarely) was so infectious it nearly burst your
heart and gave you a sense of how intense his feelings (about anything) always
were. How delightful he was; what
fun he was at those times.
The
word for what Art had is charisma.
I thought I felt it when I touched him: a constant humming underneath his skin, a motor or a current. He was magnetic. No one was more violently drawn to him than
Wilk.
He
was a small, skinny, pale, ratlike, drunken, pink-eyed, blonde. He'd fastened on Art early. During the '60's, he'd brought his wife
on visiting days to a prison Art was in (Tehachapi) and commanded her to let
Art feel her up behind a shed. He
worked in hospitals in some capacity and steadily stole a whole rainbow of
pills for him. Early on, I
declared war against him, but Wilk was a persistent sneak who'd watch the house
for days if necessary, waiting for me to leave. Later, when Art began to work again, Wilk turned up in every
local nightclub, overwhelming Art with drinks and drugs. Out of love and, I thought, envy, Wilk actually
seemed to be trying to obliterate Art with his offerings. When I begged him to please stop it, he said, with perfect logic, "Laurie, if I don't give him drugs, he doesn't talk to me." I fantasized hiring a hitman. Art felt sorry for him. And grateful. Mack died.
Ann and John moved to the country with their dogs. Wilk was always with us. If anything makes me glad that that
part of my life is over, it's the absence of the inevitable, ubiquitous,
creeping, goddamned Wilk.