Straight Life (34 page)

I testified for Frank at his trial. I said that when I went to his house I had the dope on me, that I had just stopped by his house to help him move, which I had done, and it helped Frank, and he straightened everything, and that saved my life. But to this day there are people who read that story in the papers who believe that Art Pepper is a rat. And there is nothing that ever happened to me that was more horrible.

When I went to testify for Frank, I went under cover; the narcs didn't know what was happening. Before they did know I was already in the courtroom in the custody of a deputy sheriff. When I came out, as I walked with the deputy, I told him, "I'm afraid. I'm afraid these detectives are going to kidnap me and kill me." He said, "Don't be silly. Nobody would try anything like that." We walked down the hall and around a corner. There's Solagi, Sanchez, and MacCarville. They're sort of lounging in the hallway. I tell the sheriff, "There they are!" They give me a cold look. They walk up to the deputy and flash their badges. They tell him, "We'd like to take Pepper, here. We've got permission from the jail." They made up some story. Solagi says, "It's okay. It's all clear." Now, they were going to take me out and they might have killed me, but what happened next was incredible. It was like a movie. This deputy sheriff unbuttons his holster, puts his hand on his gun, and says, "I'm sorry. He's in my custody. I brought him here; I'm taking him back. You can come along with us, and when he gets back into the jail you can present your papers and take him from there."

They tried everything. They joked with him, and they grabbed me, and I said, "No! No!" and held on to the deputy sheriff, "Don't let them take me!" And they laughed. Sanchez glared at me. But this guy realized that what I had told him was true, and he would not let them take me.

The deputy took me to the jail. He told the desk sergeant, "If anybody comes for this guy make sure it's legal and everything's in order." They took me back into the jail, and then Frank came. So I was vindicated with everybody in the tank. The way it ended up they finally got Frank for some ridiculous thing. They framed him, but it had nothing to do with me.

END OF THE ROAD by John Tynan

For detective sergeants Ed Sanchez and Ray MacCarville of the Los Angeles police department's narcotics division, it was a routine stake-out.

Inside the house that they were watching, at 1113 Stone St., Lupe and Frank Ortiz went about their business of the moment as they prepared for a visitor. The Ortiz' business was alleged to be the sale of heroin; the expected visitor was Art Pepper.

To the waiting detectives, Pepper's appearance and entry into the house was a trigger for action. For an hour they waited expectantly. Then Pepper reappeared.

"We followed him for about two or three blocks," MacCarville said later. "Then we picked him up. He had a half-ounce of heroin on him and admitted being a user."

At police headquarters on Oct. 25, Pepper was booked for possession of the drug (estimated value: $240). Bail was set at $12,000. A three-time loser, he faces a sentence of from five years to life imprisonment.

Contrary to erroneous reports in the metropolitan newspapers, the bail was not posted. Pepper was left to the agonies of withdrawal in tank 11D-2 of the county jail. ("He's hooked real bad," said an officer the day after his arrest. "He was real sick today.")

To the police, Pepper was merely bait. On Oct. 26, narcotics officers closed in on the Ortiz operation, and the house on Stone St. was crossed from their list.

The police had Pepper dead to rights. Some three months prior to his arrest for possession, the altoist had been picked up for needle marks by a county sheriff's radio car, had pleaded guilty to addiction in court, and was sentenced to serve 90 days in the county jail. Before the full term of that sentence had expired, Pepper was released. A good-behavior release of this nature is not unusual.

But it was patently clear that the "monkey" had claimed a victim, and Art Pepper's troubled career had apparently come to the end of the road. Affecting adversely an application for parole is his record as a parole violator for which he served his last prison term in the federal penitentiary on Terminal Island, Calif., in 1955-56. He was released in June of that year.

Pepper's first narcotics conviction (for heroin) was in 1953. He served some time in Los Angeles county jail at that time, then was transferred to the U. S. Public Health hospital at Fort Worth, Texas, from which he was discharged in May, 1954.

The ravages of heroin on human life have perhaps never been demonstrated more clearly than in the story of 35-year-old Art Pepper. As it does with us all, his life touched and affected the lives of others. His first wife, who divorced him during his term in Fort Worth hospital in 1954, is now happily married to a San Fernando Valley, Calif., businessman. Pepper's daughter, now a teenager, lives with her mother and stepfather. Thus, while heroin shattered Pepper's first marriage, only he was permanently scarred.

In 1956, out of prison and still on parole, Pepper was given a second chance for happiness. He met his present wife, Diane. During the ensuing four years, he repeatedly stressed his debt to her for "keeping him straight."

At the end of 1957 Pepper could say with conviction, "My wife is the one who's made me happier than I've ever been in my life" (down beat, Jan. 9, 1958). "Now I really look forward to my older years. I used to be scared of growing old-but not now. Diane has done more for mein one year than all others did in my life's entirety."

"Whatever I may do in music from now on," he continued, "and whatever credit I may get for it belongs to her. She didn't give me back just my self-respect and career. Diane gave me back my life."

And a bare seven months ago, Pepper declared just as categorically (down beat, April 14), "Diane's understanding saved me; I owe so much to her. My marriage now is permanent and so very different from before. No words can describe what it means to me."

On Sept. 22, one month and three days before the altoist was left in a county jail tank to kick his habit "cold turkey," Diane Pepper was admitted to Orange County, Calif., general hospital in a coma induced by an overdose of phenobarbital taken to combat the withdrawal symptoms of heroin.

According to the report of two medical examiners at the hospital, numerous needle marks were found on her body. In the opinion of the examiners she "had been a heroin addict for a number of years."

Acting on an affidavit filed against her for narcotic drug addiction by Detective Sergeant Robert Manning of the Orange police department, Superior Court Judge Crookshank ordered her committed voluntarily to the California state hospital at Norwalk, Calif.

To detective Manning, it was an old and ugly story. He told of finding her slumped in the back seat of a car he had pulled over because, he said, he spotted two known narcotics violators in the automobile.

Rushed to the county hospital for emergency treatment, she later told Manning she had swallowed 30 phenobarbital tablets to ward off the pain of withdrawal. At 1/4 -grain each, Manning estimated, the dose totaled 71/2 grains of the drug, "enough to kill anyone else." Why hadn't the overdose proved fatal?

Said the detective. "There was still enough reaction from heroin in her system to keep her alive."

Diane admitted to Manning, the officer said, that she had been "turned on about two years ago by her husband." She added that she had "wanted to kick, but Art wouldn't go along with her."

Manning said she told him she was "shooting about four grams a day and that Art was shooting seven."

"That's around two spoons," observed the detective. "Quite a bit of junk."

The life of fantasy in which the heroin addict exists is productive of strange, often inexplicable thought processes. In the case of Art Pepper, deep feelings of anxiety and self-pity seemed to dominate his thinking. He was given to dark moods of depression, and the persistent delusion of persecution, like the drug his system subsisted on, was never far away. And the constant stream of optimistic thinking, running like a broken thread through his life as an addict, was merely self-delusion and a stark symptom of inner despair.

Yet, for all the fantasy and inner-life induced by heroin, Art Pepper at times exposed himself to brief and brutal flashes of reality, of true consciousness about what dependence on the drug meant to him as a human being and to those he yearned to love.

He knew what continued addiction meant. He knew it spelled death.

In the summer of 1956, when he tape-recorded a long and frank interview for this magazine on his mental illness, he said, "Of course, this (his 1954 conviction) makes me a two-time loser. If I goof again and get busted, I can get 30 to 40 years in prison under terms of a new federal law. . ."

During the same interview, he noted "I've been working with Jack Montrose. I really like his writing and he's a wonderful person to work with." Montrose at a later date was arrested for heroin addiction and possession.

Again, reflecting on what a future narcotics arrest would mean, Pepper told this writer a year and half later (down beat, Jan. 9, 1958), "I think of the progressive steps that'll result from my goofing. First of all, I consider, the narcotics detail gets the word and before long I get picked up. This has got to happen; there's no escape. Then I get sent up for maybe 30, 40 years. My record takes care of that. I think about never again seeing my wife, my friends ... never again being able to play, which is the thing I want to do more than anything else. Well, by the time I'm through with this line of thought, I'm shaking with fear, so scared that the feeling (for a fix) is gone."

Somewhere along the line this fear was conquered-by heroin.

And to the last, to the time of his final arrest on Oct. 25, Pepper's emotional defense mechanism against the outrages of the mess that had become his life went to bat for him. He told arresting officers MacCarville and Sanchez, they said, that he felt he was still a young man, and he figured when he got out of prison, he'd still have his life before him.

Earlier this year, Pepper had begun to reassert himself on record dates as the superlative musician he is. He had begun to make his own albums once more, and it was unanimously agreed by all who heard them that the altoist was expressing himself as he never had before. His horn was heard on a variety of albums recorded for several labels and on the sound track of the motion picture, The Subterrraneons. Things were at last beginning to look up for Art Pepper.

His friend and constant collaborator, Marty Paich, was responsible for much of the unveiling of the "new" Art Pepper. Paich constantly called him for record dates, and last spring told this writer, "I feel the situation between Art and myself is similar to that between Miles Davis and Gil Evans. We understand each other." Paich described the altoist as a musician "of the utmost jazz caliber. There's no one else I would write for because the minute he hears the background, he makes an immediate adjustment to the arrangement." Paich summarized his feelings by declaring, "Art Pepper is probably one of the most dedicated musicians I know. He just lives for that horn."

What Paich did not know at the time he made the statement was that there was a compulsion driving his friend more overpowering than music, than the loss of heaven and the fear of hell, than eating or sleeping, than love or hate, than life or death-the craving and the physiological and psychological need of heroin.

When told of Pepper's arrest, a stunned Marty Paich could only comment haltingly, "During the last few months, I used him on record dates a few times, and he acted awfully weird. I tried to talk to him about it, but it didn't seem to do any good."

Ironically, Paich had been trying to reach Pepper the week of his arrest. He wanted to use the altoist on another record date. But there is no phone in tank 11D-2.

For this gentle, introverted, mentally tortured artist and for all the Art Peppers, society has sanctioned a law-"Thou shalt not find this way out." Because he sought whatever release heroin brings, and found in it his personal panacea, this musician became a criminal in the eyes of the law. And the law is absolute.

To the officers who arrested him, to the judge who may send him to prison for the rest of his life, to Federal Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger, who has expressed contempt for all addicts, the life of Art Pepper may be summed up by the cynicism, "file closed on one junkie." To those who appreciated and were fulfilled by his music, it must be, "File closed on one artist." down beat, December 8, 1960. Copyright 1960 by down beat. Reprinted by special permission.

(Ann Christos) I first met Art at the Lighthouse. Actually, back in Minnesota my husband, a musician, used to listen to his records and he'd say, "Now, listen here! This is Art Pepper!" And then when I came to California, I went down to see him, and I was fascinated by him. I started following him around; he thought I was insane. I heard that he was sleeping in East L.A. in a car, and I remember I woke up at about 3 A.M.: the passage of the moon by the window, the light, had awakened me. I got up and went down to East L.A. and drove up and down the streets looking for him. I saw him the next night and I said, "I looked for you." He said, "I was sleeping in a car on such-and-such street." He was playing at the Lighthouse. I don't know what he was doing. He was on the streets. I don't know what drove me, but I felt I just had to help him. I talked to a black trumpet player, Joe Gordon, and he said, "Don't get involved with him. He'll just drag you down." I said, "It's not sexual or anything. I don't know what it is. I just feel that he needs help."

Two weeks after I looked for him in the car, I heard that he was in jail. I was at work, and it came over the radio, and I went down to Esther, a waitress at the Lighthouse. I said, "Art's in jail. Let's bail him out." It was about five hundred dollars and he didn't particularly want to come out. He really thought we were insane. We got him an attorney, too, but Art said, "Don't waste your money." What year was that? 1960?