Straight Life (61 page)
I was out on the beach with Laurie the next day, and I saw Betty. I realized that the longer I put it off, the harder it would be to talk to her. I got up and walked over. Betty was getting a suntan; she had her straps down; she had kinda large breasts. She was lying there and I was thinking, "My God, this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever done in my life!" I walked up to her and said, "Betty Georgelos?" She said, "Yes?" I found out later that Bob Holmes had already told her I was going to talk to her. She knew everything, the whole story, but rather than helping me any, she didn't say nothin'. I had to say every word. And she got very businesslike. She pulled her straps up. She got very dignified.
I said, "I'm Art Pepper." She said, "Yes, I know." I said, "Well, I want to ask you something." She said, "Yes?" I said, "Well, uh, well, uh, one of the girls in your tribe, a girl that caught my eye, and I really like her ... Laurie?" She said, "Yes?" I said, "Well, I really like her, and she's in your tribe, and so, you know, I thought, well, you know." She said, "What?" I said, "Well, I would like to make it with her." She looked at me real shocked. She said, "What do you mean make it with her? I'm not a madam! This isn't a whorehouse! Where do you think you are?" I said, "No, I didn't mean it that ... I mean, I like her and I want to go with her." She said, "Well, that's a little different. Does she know about this? How does she feel about it?" I found out later that Laurie had already talked to her. I said, "She's agreeable, too." She thought for a while and then she said, "Well, you know Laurie's a very nice girl. I want her treated like a lady." I said, "I really care for her. I'd like to go to the guestroom with her." She said, "There you go again! You can't go to the guestroom. First you get in a courtship. That'll allow you a little more freedom. You can hold hands. You can kiss goodnight-just a plain kiss. And if that works out alright, then we'll see about the guestroom." I said, "Is that it?" She said, "That's it. You're now officially in a courtship with Laurie." I said, "Thank you." I went back to where Laurie was lying. I said, "Everything is straight. Isn't that nice?" I said, "Can I hold your hand now?"
There was this idiot Puerto Rican, had never been anything but a street hype, and he worked in Synanon security. They had, like, police cars that said Synanon on the sides, with walkie- talkie radios, and they rode around in these cars trying to find someone drinking a can of beer. And a lot of people you find that get put in positions of power, they can't handle them-President Nixon, that's the prime example. Well, this guy was another strata but just as bad. I forget his name; we'll call him Pendejo, just to have a name.
Laurie and I would meet in the evenings after our games. We'd go to the dining room. They had stuff out all the time, leftovers and garbagy food, like, "Feed 'em so much they can't do anything else." And most people ate like pigs. We'd eat and bullshit and then take the bus back to the Clump. There was a little area where there were some workshops that were closed at night. There was a board we could sit on. We'd sit there and kiss.
One night we were out there fooling around and we saw a light. I knew it was one of these security assholes, so I said, "We'd better get out of here." We walked to Laurie's place and stood there at the door saying goodnight. I put my arms around her and kissed her, and all of a sudden there was a light shining on us, a spotlight, and somebody hollers, "Hey! What you doing there? What you doing? Stand still! Don't you move!" And this Pendejo comes running out. I yelled, "What in the fuck is wrong with you? Turn off that fucking light, you asshole!" He shouts back, "Don't you talk to me like that! I take you down to the club and shave you head! I have you head shave!" Laurie says, "Oh, Art, don't." I say, "This fuckin' guy!" He says, "Don't you cuss at me! I have you head shave!" This punky-assed street hype from Puerto Rico! Laurie says, "Art, please, please." She says to him, "What were we doing?" He says, "I saw you! You were almost doing it right here on the street!" I said, "Shut up, you asshole!" "Don't you talk to me! I shave you head!"
He wrote us up. A citation. This would go to our tribe leaders. He said, "Don't let me catch you again! You can keees, but that's all!" I'm forty-four years old. Laurie's nearly thirty.
I always wanted to go for walks, but Laurie didn't think it was good for me. I wasn't into the house enough: I should try to involve myself in the community. So one day I'm walking around the community and I can't find her. I go to her dorm: "No, we haven't seen her." I wait. I go down to the club and look around. I walk all over the beach. I come back to the Clump. Nobody's seen her. Then, here she comes with some other girl and a guy and a tall, gangly, gawky-looking rumpkin. She sees me. This tall asshole gives me one of those looks, "Yeah, sucker." She says, "Oh, Art, this is So-and-so." I say, "I know who he is." I say, "Can I talk to you?" He says, "I'll see you later, Laurie." "Goodbye, have a nice trip." "Be sure and come and visit."
I got her alone. "What is this shit?" She said, "Well, we went for a ride." "What do you mean you went for a ride? I thought we were going together! What's all this stuff-'we should stay in the house' and all that?" "Well, we've known each other for a long time. He's going to Tomales Bay. There were four of us. We went for a little ride to say goodbye." I told her, If you want that fuckin' asshole, go get him!" "You don't own me!" "Alright, fuck you!" I walked away.
Later on I started feeling bad so I walked to her dorm. I saw a bunch of people up in her tribe room, which was in an apart ment near the dorms. She comes down the stairs. She sees me. "Art, I want to talk to you." Her new tribe leader comes to the door, Frankie Lago, some sage of the place. Laurie says, "I want to play a game with you." "What do you mean a game? I don't want no fuckin' game! If you want to make it with me, great. I'm not going in no game with you!" Frankie talked to me: "This is the Synanon way. It's a good way. Why don't you just try it once?" Against my better judgment, I was goaded into going upstairs. I walked into the room and here were all these people, all Laurie's tribe, all totally hostile toward me. She runs down this story-how unreasonable I was. I'm acting just like I'm in the streets. She's had enough of that bullshit. I tell her what I think, one thing leads to another, and all of sudden she shouts out, "Shut up, you motherfucker!" I looked at her. I looked into her face. I couldn't believe she had said that. I said, "That's it. It's over. What did I do to cause you ... You must really despise me. What did you even start to get in a relationship with me for?" Everybody started talking: "That's the game." "You're supposed to get your feelings out." "You use those words. You don't really mean 'motherfucker' per se."
I had to get away from there. It was so humiliating to have a little chick, like, sitting there calling me a motherfucker in front of all these people and have these dumb little broads glaring at me, putting in their two cents' worth, and the madder you get the more they jump on you and the more you lose. No matter how loud you scream they can scream louder. And no matter how long you talk, when you run out of breath they're there to start raving again at you. And laughing.
I didn't let Laurie forget that incident for a long time, and whenever we got into a game together I'd rave at her about it. She apologized after. She didn't mean it in that way: "The only way you can make it here is playing games. It's worked for other people." She'd decided she wanted to do something for herself and had gone into Synanon wholly accepting whatever they said. I guess she was right. I guess that's the way. With my background and at my age I wasn't able to go along with anything or anybody that much, but I finally forgave her.
The day we got permission to be in a relationship Laurie and I had lunch together in the club. In order to get down you had to make an appointment through the woman who was in charge of the guestrooms. The guestrooms were in the club. We ran into this woman. I asked her, "Do you have anything right away?" She said, "Well, usually you have to hand in your request on Sunday night. You get two times a week to start out, just two-hour sessions. Later you can get four hours and when you have seniority you'll get overnights. You give me the times and days you prefer and then list alternate choices. You can't always get the times you want." I told her, "I'm just wigging out. I've gotta make it." She looked at her book: "Well, I've got some time this afternoon." I called my boss. I had a new one, a guy. I asked him if I could get off work an hour early to make this appointment. He said, "Oh, yeah, man, definitely. I tell you what you do. Take two hours so you'll have time to shower and all that."
Now we needed sheets. You take your own double bed sheets to the place. I told Laurie, "It doesn't matter. We don't need no sheets. We'll just lie on the floor." This guestroom chick asked Laurie, "What happened to the sheets you had before?" "I gave them away." I said, "Thank God!" The chick said, "I've got some brand-new sheets across the street in my place." She gave us two sheets and two new pillowcases. She was an older chick, and she liked us both. She was a real romantic.
I went back to work all excited. Just the idea of balling like that, by appointment, and doing it in the daytime! But I started worrying. "Will she like me? Will I be good? Will I like her?" And I couldn't remember the last time I'd balled without liquor or pills or dope.
I met Laurie back at the club. There she was with the sheets in a big straw purse; she was so embarrassed. News there travels fast; everyone in the club knew what was going on and they were all staring and the girls were giggling. I said, "Let's go up to the room." She said, "Why don't you go up and I'll follow. Or I'll go up. Please, you go get some coffee and bring it up. I'll have the bed made by the time you get there." I went for coffee. Everybody was saying, "Yeah! Work out, Art!" And, "Boy, I know you're going to enjoy that!" It was really far-out. I liked it. But all the attention got me nervous again. What if I couldn't get a hard-on being sober? I carried the coffee up the stairs, try ing not to spill it. Six floors. No elevator. By the time I got there I was just panting. She's got the bed made and the shades pulled. She said, "Look what I got." She'd lit some candles, really pretty. I put the coffee down. We looked at each other for a moment. There was no strangeness at all. All of a sudden we had our clothes off and we were laying on the bed making love, and it was the most beautiful thing in the world. And it was so vivid. There was no numbness from juice or stuff. After we finally separated, we lay there looking at each other and I tried to cover up my stomach. At first I'd had a shirt on, but Laurie'd made me take it off; now I reached for it, but she said, "Oh, please don't. I think it's beautiful. That's you. You look real. I like the marks around your eyes, everything about you. I don't like a pretty man without wrinkles or scars." She stroked my stomach, and she kissed it.
23
Synanon: Games,
Raids, the Trip
19691971
THE GAMES were like group therapy. I'd been through that in Fort Worth, San Quentin, Chino; I figured this would be the same. But, whereas in prison a psychiatrist or a psychologist was in charge of the group, in Synanon actually nobody ran the games. In prison the therapy sessions were designed to find out problems and help people: they tried to build you up, very polite. In Synanon you put the game on a person and the way he sat, the clothes he wore, the expression on his face, the way he talked-those were the things you picked apart. And you got him so angry he lost his inhibitions. You got him so frustrated and humiliated he'd flip out and let his real feelings come forth. The game was a place to cathart. It was a verbal vomiting. In prison in group, I knew I could only say certain things. If I said other things it would put me in a bad light with the psychiatrist and might hurt my chances for release. I found out in Synanon I had nothing to lose. Well, if you drank or got loaded or balled some chick without permission (and later on if you smoked), those were things you could get a bald head for or get thrown out for. But you could talk about everything else. You could rave and rave.
At first I didn't want to expose myself. I was afraid it would be impossible to live in a place where I'd let people know my feelings. But it got to the point where people were so rank to me in the games I couldn't contain myself anymore. They called me an old man and said it was a wonder I could even make it up the stairs. I got madder and madder. They said I was a has-been player playing old-time jazz. They got me so fuckin' upset! I started raving like a maniac. I started telling people what I thought of them, and the hate just poured out. Even I was surprised at the hatred I had.
But I wasn't an effective game player. All I was, was full of hate and anger, and after a while I noticed that people would say something to get me started and then just sit back and laugh. You weren't supposed to commit physical violence or threaten physical violence even in the game. Several times I threatened to kill somebody or throw them out the window, and they would just laugh until some old-timer who was the weight in the game would tell me to shut up or he'd have to call downstairs and have me locked up. When you put the game on someone else you run an indictment, but it has to make some sense so the game will follow you and back you in your indictment. The people were all against me and wouldn't follow me in my indictments, so I wasn't really getting anything out of the game and it was driving me crazy. I wasn't playing music at that time; I didn't have my horn to talk for me. But I did have my voice, and I knew I could express myself in these games if I could get the people on my side.
One time I remember I was sitting in a game with this guy, Bill Coates, a friend of mine, a black cat who'd grown a big natural. The black people had finally gotten away from conking their hair. They'd gotten on the black is beautiful trip, and now they were growing huge naturals that made them look like headhunters from the upper Amazon. Well, this cat grew one of these things. He was a groovy cat. We'd put each other on, but we really dug each other. So somebody was talking to someone in the game and all of a sudden I interrupted and said, real polite, "Oh, uh, pardon me, just a minute, excuse me. Before we go on I have to say something." Everybody looked at me and they said, "Aw, no!" They thought I was going to come up with my usual thing, but I finally got them to quiet down and then I said, "Pardon me, boy." And I looked at Bill Coates. He said, "Are you talking to me?" I said, "That's right, boy." He said, "Alright, honkie, whataya want?" And I said, "Lookit. Alright. I know you people are trying to get your thing together and that black is beautiful; that's great, you know, if you want to do that, and 'let the white people do the dirty jobs,' and 'we want free money from the government,' and 'we don't want to be sent to jail because we're black and prejudiced against,' but, well, I'll forget all that. There's just one thing now. There's women in this room, right?" And he said, "Yeah. . ." And I said, "Well, would you please ... before we go on ... would you please remove your hat?" Everybody just cracked up.
From that moment on I played a great game. And I remembered when I was with Kenton's band on the bus, I used to be the life of the party because I was so funny. I realized if I could put this humor into my game playing I'd get the people on my side and they'd follow me in my indictments. I could still get rid of my anger, but the comedy would make me popular. So I'd run long indictments on people, make them as funny as I could, and have the whole game behind me, laughing like crazy. Little by little I began to be looked upon as a great game player. It got to the point where when I'd go into the "Stew" .. .
The Stew was the only game that allowed spectators. There was a room set aside for it with twenty chairs for the participants and bleachers so people could watch. It ran twentyfour hours a day, every day, and everyone was scheduled for a stint in the Stew every month or so, which lasted up to seventytwo hours with two short breaks for sleep. Downstairs there was a stew schedule listing who was going to be in the Stew when. If you saw the name of someone you wanted to talk to in a game setting you could go up and join the stew for a little while. Everybody looked into the stew at least once a day. That was the center of the house. You picked up all the information about whatever was happening there, and it was the major entertainment of the place. Jack Hurst, the director and one of the sharpest, funniest game players, would drop into the Stew a lot to play, and you could pick up a lot of pointers from him. I began to get hooked on the game, and I started studying it, but I wanted to be original and have my own style, which I gradually developed. And then I started noticing that when I was scheduled into the Stew all the kids would come up to watch me and laugh. I was like an actor. It was beautiful. And I'll have to admit that nothing I've ever done has been more beneficial to me than the game playing.
By the time I got to Synanon I'd reached the point where I no longer enjoyed playing music, and because of my physical con dition I was afraid I wouldn't be able to play again. I was thinking when I left I'd find something else to do. I really enjoyed the office work. But people kept after me all the time asking me to play, and so when Christine contacted Synanon after I'd been there for three months, I left word asking her to drop off my tenor.
I started woodshedding down in the basement of the club. It felt good to play again. I decided to blow just for my own enjoyment and to play hooplas when I felt like it. They had hooplas after games, sometimes two or three in an evening. We'd play "Ode to Billy Joe," "Watermelon Man." And there were some excellent professional musicians in Synanon. We had Wendell, a black tenor player, really played well; Marty Meade, "the Troll," a crazy little guy who played good piano and wrote music; Lew Malin, a very exciting drummer; and Lou Loranger, who played bass. We had a Puerto Rican, Jaime Camberlin, who played congas; other people sat in and played the shakers, the maracas. Later on we got Frank Rehak on trombone; he was on some of Miles's albums. And the people got the same thing out of dancing to our hoopla's as we got out of playing them, a complete release. It was very e -.citing.
I found myself getting stronger and stronger. My tone developed. My mind cleared. I was sober and playing better than ever. I ran into Stymie again in Synanon. He had organized a choral group. I started writing arrangements for it and playing with them, and someone got a rock group together to play upstairs for the kids, so I was playing with them, too. Then Tom Reeves, an old-timer in Synanon, began organizing the musicians and even instituted musical games.
We had our first musical game in the Stew. Instead of talking we blew our horns at each other. It was recorded and sounded very far-out. Then we decided to have another game alternating words with the blowing. We went down to the weight room in the gym and set up the instruments. There were about eight of us. We played for a while and then stopped, and things just naturally took their course. From the playing someone would emerge that we wanted to talk to. We were supposed to be playing together, but Wendell played longer and louder than anybody. We couldn't shut him up. I told him, "Boy, you sound just like you are-ugly and brutal and full of hate." Everyone jumped on him, and he wigged out: "Fuck you assholes, fuckin' Uncle Toms and honkies! Fuck you, Art Pepper, fuckin' Colonel!" He ran out of the game while we hollered, "Yeah, yeah, baby! Cry, cry, baby!" Then all of a sudden he was back, "Fuck you honkies!" And he ran out again carrying his horn. Then we put the game on this chick, Karolyn, a lesbian. She played the flute. She was a great whipping post for me. I called her a double-ugly old whore and told her, "I wouldn't touch you with Wendell's dick!" She flipped out and started crying, grabbed her flute, and ran out of the room screaming. Then Lew Malin, the drummer, got mad and started throwing his sticks.
I've always been a perfectionist. I'd get mad at groups I was playing with and, thinking only of the music, if somebody goofed I'd turn around and look at them or say something to them on the stand right in front of the audience, and they'd get angry at me because it's not professional to do that, but I couldn't help it. By playing these games and ridding myself of these feelings I found I became much more tolerant and less quick to rank somebody on the stand. And the more games we played, the better the music was that we played together-those that were left. Hahahaha! No. They all came back, and it was a marvelous experience.
Tom Reeves was responsible for organizing the musicians and setting up these games. Tom was one of the gurus. He was very talented in a lot of things and really in nothing. He was a writer, a great game player, he had a real command of the language, and he played a little drums. He was a good tribe leader, too. He was a heavyset guy and wore a beard-I'm sure to make him look wise so the kids would look up to him. He was pretty far-out, and I used to think he was a real outsider until I discovered that he was more hooked on the Synanon system than the weakest woman.
We'd made some tapes of the musical games and of some really wonderful performances we'd done, and Tom kept these tapes. Then we had a glut raid, and afterwards the regents called a whole bunch of old-timers together and hauled them up in the dead of night to Synanon City at Tomales Bay, to Chuck, the old master. He wanted to play some games with them. While they were there, Chuck decided he'd have them all shave their heads to stop the decadence, to tighten their morales. But he did give them a choice, and I think there were a few people that had some balls and declined. Most of them went for it. Tom was one of the sheep. And later on, when Jack Hurst and Chuck Dederich began talking about jazz, saying it was decadent and evil, as was rock, Tom Reeves, all on his own, took these beautiful tapes we had made and destroyed them.
(Karolyn April) I went to Synanon, well, to be perfectly honest, I was trying to pursue my lover, Sherry. She had broken up with me. We had lived together and used for about two and a half years, and she had decided to quit being a call girl to support her habit. I ran out of government loans from the university to support my habit and there I was, in a very numbed state of mind, unable to think of anything else to do. I couldn't conceive of going back to the life that I'd led, even though the woman I'd lived with before was willing to have me stay with her. I could not do it. And I was in a state of true insanity, I think, and I was almost paralyzed. I was very unhappy. I was ripe for a mental institution, which is what, essentially, Synanon was. The only thing I knew to do was to follow Sherry, which is what I did. I don't think she actually minded it. She's a person who only has relationships for a couple of years at a time, but she doesn't really want to break off with people that she cares for, so she was kind of glad to see me.
The Synanon of that time was bad and good ... and bad ... and good. In some ways it was really good because you could be really crazy in Synanon without having to be in a mental institution. I personally had a real breakdown there after I had a serious bout with Hong Kong flu. I was very weak, and I came out of it having active hallucinations. All kinds of peculiar psychic and emotional experiences. So I was crazy in that environment, and in spite of the impossible rules everybody around you loves you. They all hate somebody-that presence that is so-tyrannical-but they all love each other.
There's another thing that you know there, that nothing's going to stay the same. You can't depend upon the status quo, no matter how good you think you are. You can never do it all right. There's always that vindictive spirit that goes about that environment, ready to point a finger. And in Synanon it's like something out of Salem, Massachusetts. You're accused as a witch; you are a witch; now all they have to do is burn you. And they do burn you. You know, that happened again and again. And the human engineering-I always used to note that I was like an android, that people were like androids, in that environment.