The Professor and Other Writings (11 page)

But it was Jeff's fate to stay locked up inside himself. He did not have the genius, the munificent resources, of an Art Pepper. Art has a story in
Straight Life
about almost killing somebody, just before he got out of San Quentin. He'd been put in the prison “adjustment center” for glue sniffing and overdosing on some contraband pills called black and whites:

Blame it on bureaucracy: somebody's date with the shank was not to be.

In spite of the torments he suffered, Art, you would have to
conclude, was blessed by life. This has to be in the end one reason why I'm so drawn to him. Yes, in lots of ways he was just plain lucky: witness the dumb moral luck in the foregoing. It's exhilarating to see people escape disaster in some goofy and arbitrary fashion. But Pepper was also blessed by having a language. Not just
one
language, in fact, but two. He could play and he could talk. He did both things well enough, so gorgeously in fact, that despite all his flaws people came to love him and wish him well. And being loved he somehow managed to survive. On account of his honesty (or brilliant stab at it) he was granted a second life. (Art, writes Laurie Pepper in the afterword to
Straight Life
, “valued honesty above fame, even above art.” 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.”) Jeff had no human utterance and was cut out from the love side of things from the beginning. He was granted only a miserable smidgen of a life. Frail Watteau—not to mention Mozart—outstripped him by quite a bit. Who's to say what's fair or why things turn out the way they do?

I pride myself on having a language, of course, and on being able to put my thoughts into words. It's one of the genteel ways I like to stomp on people: a kind of evil hobby, the downside of taking an interest. I've been going after my mother for some time now; I've been a hard daughter for her to love. She deserves a lot better. For years I cherished (and often recounted to gratified therapists) a disreputable episode I witnessed one Christmas during her marriage to Turk. Jeff was there and about fifteen, so I must have been in my early twenties. Jeff was fooling around on the upstairs landing, on the little balcony overlooking the living room. The rest of us all sat below. Somehow he had hoisted himself up onto the balcony ledge, and was balancing there precariously when suddenly he lost his grip and flipped over the railing about fifteen feet to the ground. I jumped up along with everybody else and saw him on the floor next to the stairs, whimper
ing bizarrely. He was okay, it turned out, but had fractured his leg in three places. For several months afterwards he had to wear a large plaster cast up to his hip. To my mother's annoyance he had to use her bathroom during that time; it was downstairs and he couldn't get up the stairs on crutches. She used to complain about how he scratched the toilet seat with the top of his cast and left drops of dark brown urine all over the place.

As soon as Jeff fell, I looked over at my mother in amazement and saw a reflexive zany grin flit across her features. She instantly suppressed it and assumed a look of stepmotherly concern; I was the only one to see it. Turk had leapt across the room and was already busy yelling at Jeff for scaring him half to death. Yet to me her smile was fairy gold, the perfect illustration of something that Freud (whom I was avidly reading at the time) was always talking about: how when people try to hide their real feelings, the feelings slip out anyway, in involuntary tics and small, incriminating gestures. It was the kind of thing that characters did in the novels of Richardson and Laclos. What a hypocrite my mother was! As bad as Madame de Merteuil!

Self-satisfaction of this sort wears thin, however, when you get older. I told Blakey the other day that I was designing this piece so the conclusion would be like a heavily laden truck: it would start rolling backwards right at the end, and I would be crushed beneath the wheels. On purpose. All the important stuff rear loaded—then I'd show the brakes failing.
It will seem as though I'm criticizing my mother again but it will really be myself that I'm attacking!
Blakey looked dubious, so I quickly changed my tune—several times.
It's really about music!…It's really about California!…It's really about addiction!
…
It's really about car trips!…. It's really about lesbianism!
…
It's really about why I became an eighteenth-century scholar!…It's really about making up wild stories!
It's really about being moronic, like Madame de Pompadour, surrounded by putti and cooing doves, admiring herself in a hand mirror.

The thing
is
rolling to a stop now, I realize, and all that's left for me to do perhaps is to put myself in the way of it and smile. Sometimes in raucous old bebop recordings from the late forties—the grotty straight-ahead bootleg ones with murky nightclub sound, people talking and glasses clinking in the background—the music doesn't end properly, with the usual reprise and nail-it-down final chord. It just breaks off abruptly in the middle of a solo or chorus, as if someone had knocked over the mike. You're left with the sense of a close-packed human chaos, now terminated. Art Pepper is a kind of mannequin or decoy, I guess, the sort of mummified icon that even a person as terrified by mortality and other people as I am can latch onto and worship. It's true: I love his deftness and valor and craziness, and the exorbitant beauty of his playing. I love the quick, creamy sound he gets out of his alto. I love his shame-free storytelling. I love his handsome young male face. But I too was glad when Jeff fell off the landing. I hated the fucking punk—frankly wished him gone from the earth—and would have laughed out loud if I could.

 

AN ART PEPPER BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balliett, Whitney.
Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954–2001
. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002.

Dyer, Geoff.
But Beautiful: A Book about Jazz
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.

Pepper, Art and Laurie.
Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper.
New York: Schirmer Books, 1979. Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1994.

Ratliff, Ben.
The New York Times Essential Library: Jazz: A Critic's Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings
. New York: Henry Holt, 2002.

Selbert, Todd, ed.
The Art Pepper Companion: Writings on a Jazz Original.
New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000.

Mummified corpse, Capuchin catacombs, Palermo (Photo by Marco Lanza)

DID WE HAVE A GOOD
time? Palermo: raucous, sunny, dirty, Fanta cans, car-squashed plastic water bottles, bus exhaust fumes, lots of underemployed young men on rusty Vespas, and me wondering if the panic attacks I'd had the week before Blakey and I left San Francisco were going to come back again. The fill-in shrink I'd gone to see in Margo's absence right before we left said,
Terry, have some compassion for yourself
.
Take the Klonopin if you need to.
I remained girlish, surly, evil—remarking silently to myself, as a way of not listening, on his absurd brown leather pants; couldn't stop looking at them the whole fifty minutes. A middle-aged psychiatrist's idea of hipsterdom? But who am I to be critical? Writing problems—as always—the
trigger for my agitation: my appalling fraudulence and lack of skill. Tears.

We only had one full day in Palermo. I'd planned it as our “recovery day” after the SF-to-Frankfurt-to-Rome-to-Sicily eight-mile-high, Al Qaeda-be-damned holiday marathon. (Labyrinthine airport security everywhere—the two Russian planes had just “mysteriously” gone down.) Blakey, who'd been to Palermo before, insisted that the one thing we
had
to do was go to the Convent of the Capuchins and see the catacombs. Her mother, Late But Punctual, the celebrated archaeologist, had taken her there when B. was seven or eight. Only later did B. confess she'd become hysterical in the place and that LBP (in high dudgeon) had had to drag her out. Late But Punctual was an expert on the ancient Mycenaeans. What you'd call a hard case. Couldn't tolerate crybabies. The Hobbesian ethos runs in the family. B. says she's going to teach her three-year-old Korean niece to repeat the maternal motto:
bellum omnes contra omnem
.

If you type “Palermo catacombs” in on Google you can see a bit of what we saw: hundreds of mummified cadavers, most of them from the late nineteenth century, hung on the walls, set in niches, laid out on grotty catafalques, all in a sort of weird underground city with sidewalks, street lights, and little allées. Most of the corpses are those of wealthy Palermitans and their families; apparently in 1860 it was a great honor to be stuck down there. Nowadays it only costs three euros to get in. A morbid old monk at the door takes your money. No photos allowed, but obviously people sneak their cameras in. We were the only people speaking English.

Almost the first thing you see is the waxy little girl, Rosalia Lombardo, the freshest corpse in the place, embalmed in 1920 at the age of two. The mad doctor who worked on her (
Count Fosco!
) took his secret flesh-preserving formula with him to the grave. (Most of the other dead are preserved with plain old white vinegar.) Rosalia defi
nitely has a peculiar polystyrene look about her. Strange to think that had she lived she could still be alive today. My own mother—still booming around San Diego at seventy-eight in Turk's old Camaro—was born only a few years later than she was, after all, in 1926.

As for the rest: imagine all of Balzac's characters come to life—the whole roiling human comedy—then instantly dead again. Not only dead, but in the skankier stages of dissolution. Skulls that aren't quite skulls yet, Still Too Much Going On. Faces with expressions. Vestigial hair and teeth. Gaping eye sockets, some with dried-up black-currant eyes. Many of the corpses appear to be screaming; their lower jaws have dropped open or come off altogether. Others seem to be laughing (or at least cocking a snook). The Capuchins—quite a lot of them—wear big ropes round their necks signifying penance. Everyone else is in regular nineteenth-century clothing, fairly rotted away of course but enough there to be evocative. The slightly lumpy-looking hand-stitched seams are like those you see on the coats worn by Nadar's sitters. Some of the men even have little crumbly velvet slippers.
The dandy in his study!

It's all astonishingly well-organized. Professional Men (teachers, lawyers, businessmen) have their own special alley; likewise the Virgins, Babies, Widows, and French Bourbon Military Men. The priests are arranged in rows, heads reverently bowed, like baseball players listening to the national anthem. Whoever looks after all of them—now there's a job—would seem to have a sense of humor. Nonetheless, the place could stand a good vacuuming. Everything a bit musty and fluffy. “THE MOST GHOULISH SIGHT I'VE EVER SEEN,” says one of the Google bloggers. The Palermo tourist Web site is cagier: “the exposition of the corpses may arouse admiration” but “can also upset sensitive people.” So might
not
be such a good idea to take the kids. Even if they start squawking they want to see Rosalia, just say no.

So was it the gothic dust of the nineteenth century? Or the (slightly “off”) shrimp and calamari? By the time we took the ferry to Lipari, twenty-four hours later, it was impossible to ignore: a certain griping, flopping feeling in my stomach, like a lonely goony bird struggling to take off. Strange
ressentiment
at the thought of food. Campari and soda, sadly, no help—even with several beer chasers. B. tried to make me laugh—still worrying, obviously, about my lingering mental problems. At one point she succeeded in channeling Wally, our new miniature dachshund. (Named after the opera, not the duchess.)
Hi, Mommy! Are there baby dachshunds in Sicily? Can I
—wriggle wriggle lick lick—
kiss you on your snout?
Though only eight months old, Wally is as slutty and insouciant as Private Lyndie England. All she needs is a dangling cigarette and a tiny pair of four-legged camouflage pants.

Made it through the first day on Lipari okay, even managed to motor with B. round the island in a little rented rubber
gommini.
Bronzed couples kept vrooming by us in gleaming speedboats, the men, in minuscule bathing trunks, preening and smoking and standing up at the wheel. We could see them laughing at us. Not much to do when we got back, though, unless we were to take in a local theater production,
Topo Gigio e la Montagna di Pumice
. Topo Gigio, as I explained to B., was a talking mouse on the Ed Sullivan show in the 1960s. (B., thirteen years younger, has no memory of that decade.) But did we have enough Italian even for the presumably simpleminded things a mouse might say? Sorry, Topo; no go.

Like a fool I kept trying to eat that night: had some tortellini with Maalox for supper, washed down by a large
bicchierri
of orange-flavored Metamucil, the healthful fiber supplement B. had brought with us from California. Tottering around Lipari town that evening—everyone else in thongs and mini-shorts and see-through beach wraps—we looked pale and Victorian and ridiculously out of place. Lady Hester Stanhope and her Special Friend. Why hadn't we gone
to Lesbos instead? Ended up watching Olympics back at the hotel, the women's high jump. Lots of freakishly tall ladies, more like deer than women. I got fixated on their weird leggy movements. Oblique slow-motion start, arms held high and stiff, then the rapid scissoring forward to liftoff. Most of them seemed to be jumping in their underpants: pubic bones quite visible as they sailed backwards over the bar.

Next day's goal, that dream from my 1950s childhood and first cinematic glimpse of Ingrid Bergman: Stromboli! (
Gaslight
actually my favorite, though.) Piled onto the scruffy tour boat filled with voluble Sicilians and assorted squalling offspring, then churned off across the waves. Intestines profoundly restless. A couple of crampyshivery snorkeling stops in the blue Tyrrhenian sea, then debarked at Panarea for the afternoon. Still in denial, despite rough, gasping, even passionate bout of diarrhea, surrounded by mops and buckets in a little gelateria WC. Trying to persuade myself that I and the stomach bug were having only a brief affair.

A major turn for the worse, however, when we docked at Stromboli. The sun was starting to go down, the fabled volcano smoking in a sinister, belching fashion. I stopped to paw over T-shirts at one of the many souvenir stalls in a pathetic stab at normalcy. Quick addled look-in at the Volcano Education Center: B. said,
what exactly is magma, anyway?
I mumbled. Inward writhing like Laocoön. Signs all along the waterfront telling you, in several languages, where to run to if the warning sirens went off. The permanent population on Stromboli is now only 324. Walked gingerly toward the main pumice beach in desultory search of a swim. But then nothing to do but break for it: bowels suddenly on fire. B. watching in horror. Mad, self-flinging plunge into the waves, followed by Byronic exaltation (
this is something I've never done before; I am breaking every law of God and Man
); then sordid, liquefying release. Catharsis accomplished, I hurried back onto the beach groaning like Mr. Pooter after the umpteenth insult from Lupin, his annoying ne'er-do-well son.

We never made it to the Bergman-Rossellini love nest, somehow missed it altogether by wasting an hour or two in a little cyber-outpost halfway up the volcano. (The latter doubled as a kind of outfitting shop for crater-bound hikers.) Hippy music, love beads, and a single creaky Italian PC with farcically slow Internet connection. B. was undeterred, however; sat amid the helmets and goggles and backpacks catching up on the blogs from the Republican convention. The
Daily Kos
, the loathsome
Drudge
, the online
New York Times
—and me, still a bit queasy, peering at it all over her shoulder. A gloating Dubya on every Web site, looking simian and proud. How had it all gone so wrong? Pliny the Elder, ascending Vesuvius in AD 79, would never have gotten waylaid halfway up in this moronic fashion. But then perhaps he wouldn't have fallen into the lava, either. What lies in store for any of us? Poison gas, or just our eyeballs melting in our heads from the heat?

Stomach never quite that bad again, though even with Bridget and Barbara—they'd flown from London to meet us in Ortigia, our last Sicilian stop before Rome—I had a few residual minor accidents. Had to retire in haste from the Hotel Guttkowski breakfast room one morning, to the obvious displeasure of the seventy-something Polish lady who ran the operation. Some comment on her fare? She wore sunglasses indoors, like a sort of elderly cokehead; and kept saying,
“You arrrrh zho kind,”
to everybody but me. (Even tolerated Bridget and Barbara, who in matching golf shirts and vegetarian Doc Martens looked like a butch version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.) Whenever I saw her coming I hid my head in the day-old
Guardian
, or the gorgeous Electa book of Antonello da Messina paintings I had borrowed—was in fact tempted to steal—from the coffee table in the front lounge.

We'd all arrived in Ortigia on Wednesday; the same day the Russian school siege began. The latter taking a while to register: glimpses of a newspaper photo here and there, an early Reuters image of a woman who'd been let go after some negotiation running out with a
baby in her arms. But I didn't pay much heed, more concerned with how-I-am-functioning-in-this new-environment? Was I pushing B. away? (I was reading
The Human Stain
and full of pedantic pronouncements.) Ortigia itself beautiful and strange and dilapidated, a peculiar mixture of briny sea smells, narrow streets, crumbling baroque facades, slums filled with squatters. Televisions blaring from open doorways, Sicilian women hanging out laundry. Obvious poverty, but also (not so subtly) on the way up. Money coming from somewhere. A Max Mara store on the main drag. The Guttkowski itself a new, designer-ish boutique hotel catering to British and French tourists. All very “directional” and
World of Interiors
. None of it stopped me from having a gibbery little panic attack in the back seat of the rental car, though, when Bridget drove us out to swim at the lido south of Syracusa. Blakey taking my hand, like Don Giovanni with Zerlina.

The last day there—the vacation anomie setting in—we sat at a pizzeria on the dock in the sunny midafternoon, while Bridget and Barbara discussed the failings of their employer, the NHS. Both are managers. How to move people through emergency rooms quickly. Speeding up triage, etc. Thumping Europop in the background suddenly giving way to frenetic Italian news broadcast. Got a bit of it. Boldoni, the television journalist kidnapped in Iraq, now dead for sure, it seemed. Then gabble gabble gabble
scuola
gabble gabble
esplosione
. Interrupted Bridget and Barbara: “I think they just said ‘school explosion.'” Everyone looking grim and peeved and suddenly worn out. Big thoughtful silence. Don't think Bridget had cared for my histrionics the day before. Then my mind slid away and forward; wondered what it would be like to say goodbye to Blakey—for a fairly long while—in the Frankfurt airport in a few days.

The pictures everywhere, of course, by the time she and I got to Rome: of poor little kids, clad only in their soiled underpants, grasping at plastic water bottles; flopped on the ground amid trucks and
jeeps and adults with semi-automatic rifles. Mothers bent in prostration over little forms laid out on the grass. I studied the diagrams of the gymnasium, read all about the shrapnel-stuffed pipe bombs, hung from the basketball nets like Christmas lights. Haunted by the fact it was the first day of school. Everyone marching in to the music, flowers in hand. Flowers later eaten, to get the moisture out of them. The old Pope, drooping in the shadows, sent condolences, condemned the perpetrators.