Straight Life (54 page)

In the late fifties I heard John Coltrane with Miles Davis. I heard the Kind of Blue album. On that album he played everything you can imagine. He played more notes than Bird, more involved than Bird, and I loved his tone. Everything he played held together and meant something to me, and he really moved me. He's the only guy I ever heard in my life that I said, "I'd give my right arm to play like that."

It happened slowly, but by 1964, when I got out of San Quentin and started playing again, more and more I found myself sounding like Coltrane. Never copied any of his licks consciously, but from my ear and my feeling and my sense of music ... I went into Shelly's Manne Hole with a group, and a lot of people liked what I did and really thought I was playing modern, and a lot of others asked what had happened to the old Art Pepper.

When I got out of the joint the last time, in '66, I had no horns. I could only afford one horn, and I got a tenor because, I told myself, to make a living I had to play rock. But what I really wanted to do was play like Coltrane.

In '68 I got the job playing lead alto with Buddy Rich. And that day in Las Vegas, after the rehearsal, I was blowing Don Menza's alto in the motel room. I was jamming in front of the mirror, blowing the blues, really shouting, and all of a sudden I realized, "Wow, this is me! This is me!" Christine was there in the room reading a book, and at the same time she looked up and said, "Art, that's fantastic! Alto, that's you!" Then I realized that I had almost lost myself. Something had protected me for all those years, but Trane was so strong he'd almost destroyed me.

That experience-it lasted about four years that I was influenced so much by John Coltrane-was a freeing experience. It enabled me to be more adventurous, to extend myself notewise and emotionally. It enabled me to break through inhibitions that for a long time had kept me from growing and developing. But since the day I picked up the alto again I've realized that if you don't play yourself you're nothing. And since that day I've been playing what I felt, what I felt, regardless of what those around me were playing or how they thought I should sound.

The first night at Caesar's Palace I sounded good, and everybody congratulated me. Afterwards, Christine and I went with some of the guys and had a bite to eat and some drinks, and then we went to somebody's room and smoked pot and put on our bathing suits and went swimming in the pool. It was fun, and it was great to be accepted into that world. I thought of all the things I'd given up in using drugs. I started feeling good about being a musician and about life.

Every night I got stronger and played better and more together with the band. Me and Al Porcino made the band swing in a different kind of way. I was playing good solos. There was talk about going to Europe pretty soon. We made an album. Then, all of a sudden I started noticing some little pains in my stomach. And when I put my uniform on ... One night I asked Christine, "Do I look heavier to you?" It seemed like every day I'd feel these pains. I felt bloated. I went to the drugstore and bought all kinds of stuff for gas and laxatives, but they didn't help. I got worried.

We finished the job in Vegas and went from there to San Francisco, to Basin Street West. Christine and I got a room right above the club. The pain got worse and worse, but I kept playing, until one night the pain was so bad I couldn't bend over to get my music out. I didn't want to go to a doctor because I was afraid-afraid of what it might be. I was hoping it would go away by itself. I walked out of the club that night, and Christine helped me up the stairs. I sat on the bed. I couldn't lay down. I started to fall over, and I thought I was going to die. Christine got me back into a sitting position and ran down the stairs and hit on Buddy Rich. He'd heard that my stomach was hurting, but he didn't know it was that bad.

Buddy found out from the owner of the club where the nearest hospital was. He helped carry me from the room and drove me to St. Luke's. They weren't going to let me into the hospital because I didn't have insurance, but Buddy flipped out and forced them to take me. He signed for me.

They didn't know what was wrong so they couldn't give me anything for the pain. They put me in the intensive care unit. They put tubes in my nose and in my veins, and they stuck a tube from one vein into my heart so they could measure the way my heart was pumping. They had two things fastened on my chest that went to a machine that recorded my heartbeat. I remember looking at the screen and seeing it. It made a pattern and a noise, but the pattern would change and drop and the beeping would slow. I think I went into a coma for a little while, and when I came out of it I saw that the pattern of my heartbeat was very irregular and everyone had gathered around me. There had been two or three other patients in this room, and they had died. Now all the attention was focused on me. Then I saw the doctor. He was leaning on me, he had a big syringe in his hand, and I felt it prick my stomach. It filled immediately, completely with blood. He looked at it and at me and shook his head. He said, "Where's Mrs. Pepper?" They'd said she was my wife to make it easier. Christine wasn't there. He sent a couple of people to look for her, and he said, "We haven't got time to wait. We have to operate." I said, "I can't stand to have an operation. I can't stand to be cut." He said, "You've got to sign this paper. You can't live without the operation." I signed my name.

From then on, it was all hustle. They gave me a shot, and I was rolled through a hallway. I was in an elevator and in a room that was very bright. I still had all the tubes; the bottles were still hanging; people were holding them, wheeling them by me. I remember saying to the doctor, "Please put me out!" I remembered the operation in Chino. I can't stand pain and I can't stand to see blood. If I see a wreck on the highway I get sick. I got into this bright room, and they put something over my nose, and, mercifully, from that point I was out.

During this time, I later found out, besides going through the operation I was having DTs because I'd been drinking so much. I dreamed I was in a farmhouse with a gang, and we were sell ing dope and robbing and hiding from the police. We had piles of heroin. They didn't want us to shoot any, but I was begging for some of it. I was in such pain. Then the police came and started shooting at us, but I kept trying to get the heroin, and finally I got some. But every time I found a way to hide from the rest of the people the needle would clog or the dropper would break, and I could never get it into me. I wasn't hooked at that time, but I was still dreaming about dope.

I opened my eyes and saw the ceiling. I heard somebody say, "He's coming out of it. Call the doctor." I saw Christine standing by the bed. She grabbed me and said, "Thank God." The doctor came in. I was aware of a tight feeling around my stomach and a throbbing pain. He said, "How are you feeling?" I said, "I don't know." He said, "Do you know where you are?" I said, "Yeah, in a hospital." He said, "Where?" I had to think for a while. I said, "San Francisco." He said, "Don't be scared. You've had a bad time. We didn't give you a chance in the world to survive, but the way things look now I don't think there's any danger. First there's something I have to tell you, and I'm going to tell you immediately so you can start getting used to the idea. You can never drink again. We had to cut you open for exploratory surgery, and I noticed that your liver didn't look right, so we did a biopsy. It showed a cirrhosis condition. Your days of drinking are over." Then the doctor asked me if I had been in an automobile accident or a bad fight. I said no, and he said, "Well, when I put the hypodermic in your stomach, you were bleeding to death internally. All we could do was open you up, try to find out where it was coming from, and stop it. I made the incision, and blood just flew out of you, and when we got you cleaned up I saw that your spleen was ruptured. These things usually happen in automobile accidents." They had removed my spleen. I looked at the doctor and I saw that he was the leader of the gang in the dream I'd had.

I started getting pains in my upper back. I had contracted pneumonia right after the operation, and one of my lungs was filled with fluid. The doctor came in. "This is going to hurt, but it has to be done." He gave me a local anaesthetic and took a long needle and stuck it through my back and all the way into my lung. I sat on the edge of my bed bent over. He had Christine there and two nurses holding me. The pain was unbearable. He got the needle into my lung and drew the fluid out. When he was done he gave me a big shot of morphine. I said, "I don't think I could ever stand to go through that again." I looked at this monstrous jug: it was almost six inches full of a lightish pink liquid that had been in my lung.

During this period they gave me Demerol and morphine. When they started pulling me off these drugs, I dreamed and I saw things. I was being chased by police-these were dreams I'd had before-I'd be with my grandmother driving on the freeway trying to fix. She'd be trying to stop me and I'd be hitting her with my fist. I'd be running, hiding, and then I'd actually see things crawling around. Little insects.

Christine was very good. She'd stayed up with me for two days while they were trying to find out what was wrong, and when they'd decided to operate and couldn't find her, she was asleep on a little bench in a chapel they had. I kept searching my mind, trying to remember when I'd gotten a violent blow to my stomach, because the doctor said that that was the only thing that could have caused my spleen to rupture. And I remembered those times, just before I went with Buddy, when we were at our wildest, when she'd hit me so hard. I remembered that at those time I was in such pain from those punches I could hardly breathe. The first time I mentioned it to her, Christine really flipped out. I guess she thought I was blaming her. I was just trying to figure out what caused it, that's all. I don't know if she felt bad because she thought she had done it. I don't know what she thought.

While I was in the hospital-for about three months-I had visits from all kinds of people and cards and letters. It was amazing to find out how many people cared about me. There was a nurse there, a black girl; her old man dug me. When she told him I was in the hospital he got a TV for me. You have to rent them. He paid for the TV, and I never even met him.

A priest came and asked me if I wanted to talk. I said no. He came when Christine was there, and he inquired and found out she was there all the time. He asked about our financial situation. The priest made an arrangement. He paid for Christine's food, and they fed her and me at the same time in my room. That was a beautiful thing.

I didn't know how we were going to pay for the hospital. The bill was twelve or thirteen thousand dollars. Some people got together in Oakland and had a benefit for me. They rented a club in Jack London Square, and a bunch of musicians played for free. Roland Kirk played, and I had never even met Roland Kirk. It still surprises me that he would do that. They got about thirteen hundred dollars to help me pay my hospital bill. It was the nicest thing that ever happened to me. It was something amazing. I never could get over it.

For a long time after the operation, I was afraid to look down. The nurse would change the bandages, the doctor would check the incision, but I never would look at it. Finally the doctor gave me this long pitch saying, "You've got to accept yourself as you are and be thankful you're alive." He forced me to look. I got sick at my stomach. I had two incisions, one from the middle of my breastbone down to just above the pubic hair and another to the left. My bellybutton was gone. It was the ugliest thing I'd ever seen. When I was young, with Patti, she had to have a cyst removed from her ovary, and I paid a lot of money to a specialist to make a tiny incision where the pubic hair was and then go up to remove the cyst so there wouldn't be a scar. That's how I felt about those things. Now here I was with horrible scars all over my stomach, just ruined. I thought, "How in the world will I ever ball anybody? Have anybody see me?" It got to the point where I'd never take my shirt off. I hated to take a bath or a shower because I couldn't stand to see myself. And I still feel the same way. I still feel the same way.

Well, we went back to Hollywood, and I was in bad shape but I was healing. Then I got out of bed one morning, and I noticed a pain in the middle of my stomach and saw a little puffiness there. It kept getting bigger. Christine talked me into calling the doctor who performed the operation at St. Luke's in San Francisco. He said it might be a hernia.

I went to the Veterans Hospital in Brentwood, where they would treat me for free. They checked it out and said that's what it was. I was in pain. I'd gotten a bunch of pills from the hospital, and I took them all the time. I drank wine and shot stuff. A guy I knew came around with some Numorphan, pills I'd never tried before. I cooked them up and shot them. It was like shooting heroin and coke, and it took the pain away. Then I got a call from Buddy Rich. They were on their way to New York and wanted me to join the band as soon as I could. At the VA they said I could play even with the hernia. My dad loaned me a corset he wore for his back. I felt strong enough, and I knew that if I didn't get back with the band or do something I was going to get hooked and die. Buddy sent me my ticket. They were opening at the Riverboat. Fortunately, I wasn't strung out yet, so I cleaned up and got on the plane with Christine and joined the band. I'd been playing lead alto before, but now it was too much of a strain. They put me on third alto. I wore the corset; Christine would lace it up. I kept working as hard as I could. I was juicing and taking uppers. We played the Riverboat for quite a while and then started back to L.A. on the road, playing Boston and Philadelphia. We played Chicago. The pain got worse and worse. By the time we got to Texas I couldn't make it anymore, and Don Menza and the guys in the sax section told me to just finger the notes. The last night was New Year's Eve, and the pain was so bad I had to stop playing.