Straight Life (67 page)

Everybody has inner doubts. You've got to realize that. But what can they do to you? Who's gonna do what to you? I want to play. I want to have fun. And you've got to realize that those great moments, when you're playing, when it's almost like selfhypnosis, when you're almost outside your body watching yourself play, and when everything you play turns to gold; nothing goes wrong; the group is swinging, and you can do anything you want, even things you thought you could never do ... those moments don't happen everytime you pick up your horn. That's not possible. It's not possible.

Conclusion

I WAS GIVEN a gift. I was given a gift in a lot of ways. I was given a gift of being able to endure things, to accept certain things, to be able to accept punishment for things that I did wrong against society, the things that society feels were wrong. And I was able to go to prison. I never informed on anyone. As for music, anything I've done has been something that I've done "off the top." I've never studied, never practiced. I'm one of those people, I knew it was there. All I had to do was reach for it, just do it.

- I remember one time when I was playing at the Black Hawk in San Francisco. I forget the date, but Sonny Stitt was touring with jazz At The Philharmonic. He came in, and he wanted to jam with me. He came in, and he says, "Can I blow?" I said, "Yeah, great" We both play alto, which is ... It really makes it a contest. But Sonny is one of those guys, that's the thing with him. It's a communion. It's a battle. It's an ego trip. It's a testing ground. And that's the beautiful part of it. It's like two guys that play great pool wanting to play pool together or two great football teams or two magnificent basketball teams, and just the joy of playing with someone great, being with someone great ... I guess it's like James Joyce when he was a kid, you know. He hung out with all the great writers of the day, and he was a little kid, like, with tennis shoes on, and they said, "Look at this lame!" They didn't use those words in those days. They said, "God, here comes this nut." And he told them, "I'm great!" And he sat with them, and he loved to be with them, and it ended up that he was great. That's the way Sonny felt; that's the way I've always felt.

I said, "What do you want to play?" Sonny says, "Let's play `Cherokee.' " That's a song jazz musicians used to play. The bridge, which is the middle part, has all kinds of chord changes in it. It's very difficult. If you can play that ... If some kid came around, and he wanted to play, you'd say "Let's play 'Cherokee,' " and you'd count it off real fast. I said, "Well, beat it off." He went, "One-two, one-two;" he was flying. We played the head, the melody, and then he took the first solo. He played, I don't know, about forty choruses. He played for an hour maybe, did everything that could be done on a saxophone, everything you could play, as much as Charlie Parker could have played if he'd been there. Then he stopped. And he looked at me. Gave me one of those looks, "All right, suckah, your turn." And it's my job; it's my gig. I was strung out. I was hooked. I was drunk. I was having a hassle with my wife, Diane, who'd threatened to kill herself in our hotel room next door. I had marks on my arm. I thought there were narcs in the club, and I all of a sudden realized that it was me. He'd done all those things, and now I had to put up or shut Lip or get off or forget it or quit or kill myself or do something.

I forgot everything, and everything came out. I played way over my head. I played completely different than he did. I searched and found my own way, and what I said reached the people. I played myself, and I knew I was right, and the people loved it, and they felt it. I blew and I blew, and when I finally finished I was shaking all over; my heart was pounding; I was soaked in sweat, and the people were screaming; the people were clapping, and I looked at Sonny, but I just kind of nodded, and he went, "All right." And that was it. That's what it's all about.

Af to rwo rd

THIS BOOK was begun in April, 1972, completed early in 1979, and first published in November of that year. Art died in June, 1982, but during the two and a half years between its publication and Art's death, STRAIGHT LIFE changed everything for him. It and the publicity around it revived and created interest in Art's career; there were television and radio interviews and articles in major newspapers and magazines worldwide. As a result, Art spent those last years performing almost continuously, all over the world, for the biggest and most receptive audiences he'd ever seen, and recording more albums (with more major jazz names) than he had during the whole rest of his life. All of that finally got him the critical and popular recognition he'd craved, and put him, finally, jazz-historically speaking, on the map. He confidently predicted that after he died he would at last be elected to the down beat Hall of Fame, and he was-beating out Sonny Stitt who died the same year. It would be easy to say, therefore, that Art died happy. But that isn't the whole story. Not the way Art would have told it.

STRAIGHT LIFE shows that Art valued honesty above fame, even above art. In the book, people refer to him as an "honest" musician. He believed that truth was beauty and vice versa, and, when he played, he felt he was expressing the beauty of his honest emotion-which he shaped into powerful music with his skill. He had to know-and say-what was really going on. He was obsessed with knowing and with being known and believed that a failure of honesty in his life would contaminate his soul and his music. I don't want to contami nate his story, so I'm going to try to finish telling it as truthfully as he would have. At least this is what the truth looks like to me-now.

Because the book played such a major role at the end, I'll say something first about how it was made.

When Art and I first became lovers and he began telling me his adventures, I thought, as did many other people who had heard them, that they should be in a book. I'd done some writing, but I knew I couldn't write this story. And I thought it would lose too much, it would lose Art, if it were written at all. One of my favorite books is Oscar Lewis's The Children of Sanchez. It's an oral history of a poor Mexican family. Lewis was a sociologist and the book was classified as sociology, but the statistical and political information it included were, it seemed to me, just a pretext for offering the true work-the most poetic, personal, revealing, and touching autobiography I'd ever read. I re-read it in Synanon. I thought Art and I might do a book with that kind of format and told him so. He liked the idea. After he left Synanon and then wrote to me, asking me to join him, I started thinking about it again. I'd studied cultural anthropology and folklore. Art could certainly talk. I was enamored of him, but I could be objective.

I left Synanon in 1972 in response to Art's letter-he was clean, he was working, and he loved me-though I didn't necessarily believe what he said. (Art could always lie, domestically, briefly and badly about whether or not he was using, but then he invariably eventually blurted out the truth, no matter what it cost him.) I told myself that I was joining him in order to do this book. I also suggested to myself that that was a rationalization; I loved him and wanted to be with him.

We got together in February. He wasn't clean, and I was far from sure we had a future, but I still wanted to try to do the book.

Art said he was willing to tell me his story, but he kept putting me off. He was awfully gloomy at that time. I finally cornered him one afternoon in April, turned on the tape recorder, and began by asking him if he believed he had genius. In answer to my question, he told me the story of his bandstand battle with Sonny Stitt which appears as the Conclusion to this book. When he finished talking, I said, "Wow!" and he started laughing happily at what was clearly a virtuoso piece of narrative. He told me to turn the machine off and began to talk enthusiastically about the possibilities of the book. I turned the machine back on and asked him why he wanted to do a book about his life. He said,

Well, the reason I want to get the book started is because I feel a real sense of urgency, because I feel something pulling at me, and I've been wanting to withdraw and hide. Just miserably unhappy. I can feel this presence. And the presence is death. Before I started talking into the tape recorder, I had nothing to say. I did not exist. I do not exist. My life is lived. My life is finished. But in talking about the past I see that then my life has meaning. So I want to tell my story. I think that's the only way I can give any meaning to my life, for having lived the life I've lived, is by having people know it. And get something out of it. Feel something from it.

During the next months we began to tape every few days. I became compulsive about it. Art started resisting again. At first I thought it was laziness or maybe unwillingness to go into certain aspects of his life, and that must have been part of it. But the real reason, I figured out in time, was that in this storytelling, too, he was an artist, and he demanded so much of himself when the tape started rolling, he might as well have been playing a solo in a recording studio. So, it was challenging, exhausting work with no payoff (but my approbation) and he tried to avoid it. Sometimes he'd get so loaded beforehand, he'd nod out in mid-sentence. I'd kick his foot and he'd start up again just like the Dormouse in Alice. Sometimes I bribed him with candy and ice cream (he was a lazy person, and I was willing to walk to the store). I'd beg him to talk for 15 minutes and sometimes keep him going for an hour.

I had an old electric typewriter. After a month or so I transcribed what I'd recorded. I read the transcript and realized that as he'd told the stories, he'd described nobody and nothing. I instituted truly brief sessions (which he came to a little more willingly) that were "fill-ins." I'd ask, "What was your mother like?" He'd give me a few minutes of telling de scription. "What about Patti?" A few more minutes. "Just one more: `Dicky Boy."' I'd go down a list of people and things and also try to clear up any confusions about events he'd already narrated. We continued that way from then on with both chronological narrative (which I hesitated to interrupt with requests for details) and fill-ins for description and clarification.

Les Koenig at Contemporary knew what we were doing and suggested that someone he knew at a skin magazine (I think it was Penthouse) might be interested in excerpting and paying for some part of it. I thought that what they might be interested in would be sex, so I got Art started talking about his sexual career. And because there was a possibility of publication, I began to edit that material (most of it wound up in the HEROIN chapter). The magazine offered $200 or something like that and it didn't seem like enough, so we decided not to go for it, but editing had begun.

The telling of the story took about two years, the editing took four or five. Art tended to tell an anecdote a little differently every time he told it, with different flourishes, sometimes with a different emphasis. So I got him to tell me some of the same stories over and even over again. Then I'd take my transcriptions of his different versions plus the transcriptions of the applicable fill-ins, pick out the best parts, cut redundancies and excess, clarify ambiguities by changing words and/or syntax, make or ask Art to make transitional sentences and then read it all back into the tape recorder, making sure I could "talk" the changed material with ease and that it reflected Art's speech patterns and rhythms. I'd make him listen. I'd ask him, "Does this sound like you?" After I typed out the edited story-or philosophical observation-I would have to decide whether it really belonged in the book, and, if it did, where it belonged.

Many chapters fell together naturally. Others had to be built, with difficulty, out of lots of bits and pieces elicited over months. The chapter called STEALING chronicles a spiritual disintegration I had to work hard to understand and convey. It began to take shape when Art told me the tale of the armed robbery it ends with. That story troubled me terribly.

I made him tell it several times and then spent days and weeks nagging him about it, asking and rephrasing questions, explaining why I had to ask them. It was tortuous work for him to try to answer them, and it took time to really look at that day and then dredge up the ideas, influences, pressures, and acts that brought him to it. We both did our jobs so well that that remains my favorite chapter.

STRAIGHT LIFE was semi-complete by 1977, when Les Koenig called and said a fan was visiting in town and was really anxious to meet Art. Art was extremely reclusive; he said no, but Les told me the fan worked for the New Yorker. "Oh!" Says I, "Well! Send him right over!"

Todd Selbert sold advertising space at the New Yorker, and he was one of those fans who knew more about Art's career than Art did. Not surprisingly, Art warmed to him. Especially after Todd brought out of his briefcase a careful little grey paperback that he himself had published, a discography of all recordings Art had made. Art's Virgo-bookkeeper sensibilities were touched by the meticulous work that had gone into it. "Why did you do this?" he asked. "For the hell of it," Todd said.

We told Todd about our book, and he asked if he could take it back to New York with him. He took it to an editor at one publishing house who sent him to Ken Stuart at Schir- mer/Macmillan. Ken is a funny, wise, smart guy. He loved the book for all the right reasons and was ready to publish it. Why did I do what I next did? I don't remember. I sent it to every other publisher in New York. They didn't want it. We signed with Schirmer in August, 1978, and I asked for two years in which to complete the manuscript. We had to bring it up to date. I had to do the interviews.

I had shown the manuscript to a number of people while I was trying to sell it to someone other than Schirmer, and one woman friend suggested I interview some of the characters in the book. It had completely slipped my mind that this was supposed to be The Children of Sanchez. The oral histories of some of the characters in it were essential. And it became clear, too, that because Art's point of view was frequently so extreme, I needed other people's voices to balance hire-or just to bear witness. During the next year, I searched for the people, interviewed them, and edited the interviews. I interviewed all of them in person except for Alan Dean who turned up in Australia. He was kind enough to send spoken answers to my questions on a cassette.

As we neared publication, I got concerned with accuracy and started doing (sometimes purposeless, obsessive) research. I found out that Art was right about the kinds of rifles the San Quentin guards were issued during his stays there; I learned the spellings of some arcane and/or obsolete pharmaceuticals, and picked up a lot of Chicano slang. I dug through all the old down beats at UCLA and copied articles having to do with Art. I managed to get a look at a copy of Art's rap sheet. That was invaluable. Using the rap sheet and Todd's discography, I was able to get very clear about when things must have happened and to put them in their right order.

Ken told me, years later, that after the book was finished, The Powers That Be at Schirmer wanted him to cut the book to half its length. He didn't do that. He sent it to an outside editor who cut almost nothing of Art's part. She cut most of the other people's interviews down a bit. I agreed with most of her changes; I was editing, myself, right down to the wire. Ken never touched the book except, once, to restore something I had cut.

The book came out a year early. Art was, by then, with Fantasy Records, and their PR person, Terri Hinte, persuaded Macmillan to hire a New York PR guy who put us on the road. At the end of 1979 we were doing radio talk shows, TV morning shows, and being interviewed by press people all over the country.

Art was as happy and as focussed as I had ever known him to be. He was hell to travel with. Complaining constantly about any discomfort, he could be as droopily unhappy and unhelpful as a small child. But almost every interview reenergized him-because he was talking about real things that went on in his world and in his soul. He hated most social interaction, with its cold-hearted small talk. He loved the Synanon game because it was a truth game. He played his own game with these journalists. Most were willing participants, the rest could be manipulated into intimacy (or else into being an audience-a close thing, for Art, to intimacy). Sometimes they'd be moved to confess to him. He loved to talk about himself, but he could be all ears for your secrets. And of course he was unshockable.

Instead of picking up his daily methadone at local clinics (where he'd run into other addicts and lead them or be led astray-as on the '77 East Coast tour) we carried it with us, and I doled it out, a daily bottle at a time, from a handsome, costly, locked leather case I'd bought in New York. We both adored pretty, expensive things, and I guessed correctly that Art wouldn't risk damaging the case by trying to pick the lock unless he was desperate, and there was no reason for him to get desperate. He was getting coke mailed to him at our hotels from a connection in L.A.

I was handling the money and the drugs. After Art's last hospitalization, I decided that that was the way it would have to be. Art, on the prowl, got into too much trouble. He'd been scratching around with ex-cons in bad neighborhoods, disappearing for days, buying grams and half grams, and ingesting any unpredictable get-high substances these people had handy. And he wasn't going to stop. He was sure he hadn't long to live, and he was determined to spend what time he had left loaded. It seemed likely, the way he was operating, that he'd soon be busted again-and go to prison. I had no criminal record. And I had old friends who knew upscale dealers. One day I went out and came back with an ounce of the best cocaine he'd ever had. Art made an immediate and joyous commitment to the new program. Inevitably, it wasn't long before I was snorting cocaine too.