Venice Part One

In 1971 Synanon stopped smoking. The decree came down and with it punishments for inevitable violations and the subsequent departures of a lot of people. It was a way of "clearing the place of dead wood," a regular event, but secret violations continued even on the highest levels. I believe that this rule was Synanon's death knell. It turned law abiders into sneaky criminals. For a lot of people it's harder to stop smoking than it is to stop shooting dope.

All of Synanon's activities up til then had gone on under a cloud of of cigarette smoke amidst a comforting clatter of ashtrays. I hadn't been a smoker before I got there but became one. Then one of the old timers at Tomales Bay was diagnosed with emphysema and was instructed by his doctor to stop smoking. Chuck, our Leader, decided he'd better do it too. I don't think he was trying to legislate health, and don't think he understood at that time the dangers of second-hand-smoke. I think he didn't want to do it alone. So that mighty, crazy organization quit tobacco and within a few years completely lost its mind...

As follows: They...

1. Dissolved and arranged hundreds of marriages by decree.

2. Established and trained a force of "Marine Commandos" who stockpiled arms and beat up nosy strangers.

3. Put a rattlesnake in a lawyer's mailbox and let young Lance Kenton (Stan Kenton's handsome, science minded son) take the fall.

4. Started drinking.

5. Started smoking again.

In 1971 Art wouldn't, couldn't stop and was sliding off on paranoic walks to puff. I suspected him. In "Straight Life" he says, "One time I was kissing Laurie and she started sniffing. She stuck her nose into my mouth. She said, 'You've been smoking! You've been smoking!' She had her whole nose and half her head in my mouth. 'You've been smoking!.'" His life was hell.

An old pal of his had "split" and was calling him at work to tell him how wonderful it was to be free. We never spoke of it together, because he knew I'd have to speak of it in games, but I knew he was going.

He was planning to take off before Christmas, but a resident square couple, friends of ours, went back East for the holidays and offered us the use of their apartment for the week. Their record player, their kitchen, their bedroom to wake up together in. Art, I knew, would not resist this sentimental farewell. We had a heartbreaking week together talking about ourselves, the world but never saying a word about the imminent, seemingly permanent separation that was coming. I'd been trained by Synanon to imagine Art would crash and burn and that seemed likely, even to him. He was like a soldier who was required to return to the front.

During those days I played a Joni Mitchell album almost continuously listening to "I wish I had a River."

"It's coming on christmas

They're cutting down trees

They're putting up reindeer

And singing songs of joy and peace

Oh I wish I had a river

I could skate away on."

On the morning after our idyll ended I looked out the big storefront window at work and saw dark clouds parting, the remains of a stormy night. "If it clears..." I thought. I knew Art, who hated any discomfort wouldn't travel in rain and wind. I worked a while and then looked up as bright sunlight streamed suddenly into the room. The weather had turned gorgeous, fresh. "He's gone," I told myself. He was.

I'd been ready for him to leave. It didn't hit me, at first, as hard as one might think. My life was so busy running the printshop, it seemed it just included him. I was surrounded by kind friends reminding me that Art was probably shooting heroin right now, at this very moment.

An adorable young Irish dopefiend, a photographer, a newcomer with a great New York accent hit on me immediately. I considered him. Even kissed him once in a dark corner. He had a coarse, fast-growing beard. His face was too rough to suit me. But no one in the world (I knew this) could replace Art in the lovemaking department. Art's breath was always sweet; his skin silky, hotter than other people's, and I swear, his body made its own perfume; he always smelled good. He knew exactly what to do to me and exactly how to do it and encouraged me to do whatever pleased me. He told me I was beautiful constantly. Constantly. Because he really thought so. Oh, he liked women, and he adored me. But maybe I had matured a little in Synanon and didn't think that was enough.

In February Art sent me a surprising letter. He was working for Bob and Nikki Deal, two Synanon splittees who'd opened a successful bakery in Venice. He was keeping the books for them and running the daily operation of the plant -- which shipped whole-grain breads and cakes to high-class markets all over L.A. Art had the use of a car and an apartment in their house. He said he loved me, missed me, wasn't using drugs, and had been faithful to me. He begged me to join him.

My knee-jerk Synanon reaction was to turn him down, and I did.

I couldn't believe he was sober. And I never thought that I could save or change him; Synanon had educated me too well for that. But then I started thinking along the lines I've already mentioned, about how this would be the ideal time to leave if I ever wanted to come back and have Synanon deal gently with me.

I had also been thinking for a long time about how Art's reminiscences would make a book. In the guestroom, when he'd told me stories from his life, I thought he was like Othello describing his great battles to Desdemona. That's how he wooed me. Except in Art's tales he was rarely the victor. He made himself more interesting to the Modern Girl. He was often intriguingly, captivatingly, the romantically vanquished.

By then I'd read The Children of Sanchez twice. It was a document by an anthropologist (Oscar Lewis) who interviewed the members of a Mexican family about their lives. They told him their Rashomon-like stories in poetic, personal language, and Lewis put them together in a way that made the whole more powerful than any memoir or novel I had ever read.

I had been thinking that's how Art could tell his story. He could tell his remarkable life in his own extraordinary language through me. This was something I could do.

Everybody craves personal satisfaction and public recognition, but each of us requires that they come in idiosyncratically determined forms. My own amorphous ambitions had always and only to do with artistic achievement. Put simply, I wanted to be Art. But I lacked the natural ability, the inborn genius. Well, what I was beginning to think I might have was a talent for what I'll call a vital appreciation -- for what I saw, heard, for individuals, a habit of sharpening and narrowing my focus. I had already expressed it, visually, in my photographs. I thought I also had the gift that Oscar Lewis had for language. Lewis found his vehicle in the Sanchez family. Art Pepper could be mine. So at that time I thought I might have finally found a way to satisfy myself, to justify my existence. I would produce something that I could believe was important, and because Art was so charismatic, and his story so sordid, so scary, so romantic, and so sexy, the world would agree with me.

I could never have expressed it then as I have now in words. I was too impatient in those days. It was an idea mostly felt. After Art wrote me, the idea gathered strength and power. At the same time I told myself I was simply rationalizing my deep desire to be with my lover again.

One of my mentors, Tom, stopped me in a passage-way one day and said apropos of nothing, "You know if you join him you'll wind up right beside him in the gutter." "But," I thought, "I'd have a higher purpose than simple lust or love." I'd be his biographer, not his partner in the downward slide. Tom would have bust a gut laughing if I'd said that out loud.

I must have asked the I Ching about my plans (as I had secretly learned to do about everything during my years in Synanon. I've been consulting that book steadily for more than 30 years.) And the Ching must have endorsed the idea or I wouldn't have gone ahead with it.

I called and discussed all this with Art. He seemed ambivalent, now, on the phone about my joining him. He said his room at Bob and Nikki's was too tiny for two people. I told him I wanted to do a book about his life. I'd get my own place.

I acted self-possessed and calm, but Synanon had instilled in me a fear of the outside world and a fear of myself in the world. I was 31 years old, and I was terrifically afraid as I plunged into the troubled, thrilling, deep waters of my fate.

FREEDOM

At about 5 AM one weekday morning, I gathered up a very few of my few things: A binder holding all my negatives and proofsheets, a sweater, underwear, and a rusting little tin placard surmounted with a glass thermometer and advertising Camels cigarettes; I'd pried it off a rotting timber on the Santa Monica pier. I tiptoed out of the back bedroom of the apartment I occupied, while a newcomer, on her bed in the front room pretended to be sleeping. I got into my mother's car. She turned the key and said, "I think you're making a terrible mistake." I said, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."

Before I close the door on this chapter which I guess marks the end of the second third of my story, I want to talk a little more about what I got from Synanon.

I went in at 28 with such a chaotic, raving, grieving, ravenous heart, with the social habits of a feral adolescent, and just enough self knowledge to despise myself. I came out three and half years later, a more or less civilized and satisfied adult with a sense of my limits AND of my considerable capacities. I got this from living for the first time ever in a setting where real demands were made on me to play a significant role within a responsive community and finding I was able to do it.

I realize that people raised in authoritarian households can never understand how precious that was to me who was raised in utter freedom: Constantly criticized but rarely corrected. What a gift to finally be given a rule book. And then to be rewarded for good behavior (with status, respect, privileges), punished for bad (with vituperation and ridicule in Games, loss of status and privilege), having gained an understanding of what those two behaviors might consist.

One more thing. Not long before I made my decision and wound up in Synanon , I met a woman in a Wil Wright's Ice Cream Parlor in Hollywood. While I was waiting for my cone, she came up to me and, in that same mechanical, rapid, rote, sotto voce with which maniacs insistently deliver the good and bad news about Jesus and Hell, she told me she'd discovered a phrase, which, if you chant it, brings you anything you want. She said it. Then she wrote it on a napkin: "Nam miyo ho renge kyo." I took it with me and, sitting in my car, between licks of peppermint ice cream, I repeated it. What the hell, I thought. I said it over and over again for the next few weeks. What I WANTED was to be SAVED. And soon I found myself in Synanon. This is the same phrase that Tina Turner later said was key in her emancipation. So, I just had to tell you that.

My mother took me home to her house (much to my stepfather's dismay). The next day we went apartment hunting in Venice near Bob and Nikki's bakery on West Washington Blvd. I called Art and said I'd see him soon. First, I wanted to get settled. He seemed nonplussed and relieved. My mother and I found an attic apartment in a little woodframe house. 100$ a month in 1972 wasn't bad at all. The place had a long main room with windows on two sides, no views of the sea, but an enchanting one of palm tree tops and rooftops. It was sunny and breezy. There was a small kitchen with a big window overlooking a high-grown vacant lot, a "dressing room," which became my little office, and a bath. The kitchen gave onto a huge, enclosed, low-ceilinged attic space, perfect for storing all the huge, dusty furniture that cluttered the apartment, still leaving me room for a primitive, windowless darkroom conveniently near running water in the kitchen.

I went shopping with my mom in thrift shops for furniture and moved into my new place. I'd assumed my parents would bankroll my new start and they did. I don't think I ever paid them back. It wasn't an awful lot of money, and they had it at the time. Milt's business was thriving.

Bob and Nikki offered me a job, for a minimal wage, as a cashier in the bakery and generously invited me to share their frugal, filling dinners. I wouldn't have gone hungry. During the day, we workers in the bakery gorged on hot broken loaves of honeyed, heavy wheat bread piled with butter. A very few of you may remember "Good Stuff" bread when it was baked in coffee cans and came out penis-shaped, whole, stone-ground, and tasty

I'd made Art wait three days to see me. We made love in his narrow bed. He didn't come. I didn't understand it, but he was addicted to codeine and that's what it does. We were nervous with each other. Me because he wasn't as adoring as I remembered, he because of all he was concealing from me. Also, he believed I'd left Synanon for him. What a responsibility. I tried to explain to him what I've already attempted to explain to to you, reader, about my desire to write a book. He must have been confused. I, as usual, was, too.

At least he'd already discarded his interim girlfriend. I found out about her when an attractive, well-dressed woman walked into the bakery one day. She chatted with her son, an incredibly goodlooking teenaged baker. She stared at me, and rushed out sobbing. When I asked, her son said she'd been "dating" Art.

Later, Art was matter-of-fact.

"I told her that my girlfriend was coming."

"What did she think she was?" I asked not without a little smug compassion.

He shrugged. "I told her all about you right in front."

And yet he was so frequently too busy for me. I expected him in the evenings, but he was "doing the books." I could walk through the vacant lot in the moonlight, rustling through the weeds, cross the dirt alley to the back of Bob and Nikki's house. I could see whether the car Art used was there. I could see whether Art's lamps were lit. I began to make sneaky, obsessive little forays nightly. I began to be secretly jealous, but I couldn't tell of what. He'd made me jealous twice before in Synanon, but those events were mild and playful, contained as they were in a community in which it was possible to know almost everything that went on with everyone. Out here I was in limbo. .

I called my friend Art Kunkin, at the L.A. Free Press and proposed a Synanon story to him. I wanted to tell it and felt a need to make some use of my Synanon photographs. I wrote a lengthy, funny, grateful, mildly shocking piece. It ran as a feature for pages and pages along with the witty glossary of Synanon lingo I felt compelled to provide. Kunkin must have paid me something for it, and he praised the piece effusively.

I felt ready to begin writing Art's story.

Two months after leaving Synanon, I finally made Art commit to an hour with me one afternoon in Apil. It was April eleventh, according to the first tape I labeled. I went to his office/bedroom at the Deal's with a notebook and one of those, small, inexpensive tape recorders with a built-in mike. Art sat behind his immaculate old desk with its too neat arrangement of pens and pencils, an adding machine, his cigarettes, lighter, and ashtray, placed just so and constantly nudged into ever more perfect alignment. And a bottle of ale. "Mickey" was the brand he liked. A name to conjure with. I had no idea how much of this stuff he was drinking until we began to record regularly.

I said, "Tell me why you want to do this book." It had actually seemed up to that point as if it was all me, my desire to begin and his resistance. But he, obediently, took my cue. The following, edited a little, is what he said:

"Well, the reason I want to get the book started... The book was going to be written... When I was in San Quentin someone came in to visit me. He wanted to write a book on my life. He got permission to see me. He came in two or three times. Then, when I got out, and I saw him in Hollywood, I decided I didn't want the book written, because I didn't feel that that was the time to to do it. That was in '66. Now I want to have it done. Now I feel a real sense of urgency, because I feel something pulling at me. I have a strong feeling I'm not going to live too much longer, and although I have lots of reasons to feel that way physically, this is more than a physical thing. I can sense it. It's becoming like another person. I can almost touch it. It's becoming real.

"I can only liken it to one period when I was using heroin cut with procaine. I was shooting about a half an ounce of this stuff a day, and I would hear voices, somebody calling my name, outside the bathroom door, and little things would flash, I would see a flash to my right or to my left, and I'd turn my head, and there was nothing there. It was an audible thing, a visual thing; it wasn't an imagined thing. It actually happened, and it was induced by the procaine the heroin was cut with. And now I feel a presence. Just in the last couple of weeks I've really been feeling it. I can feel this presence and the presence is death."

I don't think I was even breathing. I checked the tape. It was rolling. He continued -- going far afield into a wild improvisation on aging, death, superstition, suicide in comic book imagery, Edgar Cayce, and immortality.

Then he stopped. He was done. He was very low. I was thrilled. I couldn't let him stop talking. I asked him, there, surrounded by awards he'd been given and his album covers, all of which he'd mounted on his walls, if he believed he was a genius. Because I'd heard him on this theme before.

What he said appears in Straight Life. I made it the Conclusion, his summing up, and it has been excerpted and praised in almost every review. For me it was Art's opening salvo, brilliant, touching, rhythmic, evocative, suspenseful, triumphant. When he finished with that, we both gasped. I hear us on the tape. Then we laughed. I was sitting on his little bed and hollered, "Wow!" rocking back and hitting my head on the wall. Thunk! "Holy shit!"

"Turn it off, turn it off!" Art told me. I did. Then, surreptitiously, I turned it on again.

We were both talking at once: It had been like a jazz solo, its repeating theme, its mounting vehemence, its forward movement. And yet it had been history. A document. This may have been the first time Art was made aware of just how great his storytelling gifts were. As for me, I was confirmed in my belief that there could be a book and knew that there must be.

And Art, well, he went on delightedly, saying that he was going to fall in love with the tape recorder, that he was going to start dreaming about it. That he saw now that his life was beautiful because it made sense, now, as "a recollection." And that his fate had prepared him for this, his final work, by throwing him into Synanon where playing The Game enhanced his verbal skills, and where he met me, who was making all this possible.

Though Art was to lose this early enthusiasm, making it harder and harder for me to sit him down and get and keep him talking, I had finally, finally found my calling.  My helter skelter education in folklore/oral history, music, and literature, and my childhood exposure to Dick Fraser's sly tales of his hobo adventures had prepared me exactly well enough.  I'd absorbed no rules I'd have to exert myself to follow or break.  I was from that day obsessed with Art's story, and nothing that he'd do could make me loosen my grip on him or the project until it was completed.