Art & Me & the Buick

 

VENICE: PART FOUR

 

Aside from these occasional intrusions, our life in Venice was serene. I quit the bakery and went to work part time filing and filling out forms for a stockbroker way up the coast in Malibu. This young fellow had himself an office on the Pacific Coast Highway in a darling little ultra quaint pile of one-story attached brick and stone cottages. He'd be at work from the moment the stock market opened in New York and stay until three or four in the afternoon. All day long, he leaned back in his office chair, wearing a headset phone with its almost invisible transparent tube, narrower than a drinking straw, looped around his face. The first I'd seen. If you walked by, you might think, because he looked straight at you, his remarks were meant for you. They rarely were. He was advising people on the phone to buy and sell, and every time I typed up a transaction, he made money. Sometimes a great deal. After scoring big he'd exultantly buy his wife a piece of furniture or jewelry or order flowers for her.

Us "girls" in the office thought he was a doll -- good tempered and generous, sending us out on errands to Malibu in his Cadillac and sometimes taking us all to lunch.

He must have dealt in volatile stocks, because I saw clients losing hundreds of thousands of dollars daily. As I sat there filling in the forms, I couldn't see that there was any difference between stock speculation and ordinary gambling, and gambling has always left me cold. I hate spending money on nothing. When it comes to money, my vice is, I like a blouse, a purse, a nice pair of shoes to show for it; I have about 80 pairs. Right now.

There were two other, full-time, girls in the office in their early twenties, very pretty. At 32, I was older than my boss, and I wondered how I'd gotten hired. Until one day, filing something, I found a folder with my name on it and looked inside. It contained my job application, and his notes about our interview. They were brief.
"Smart."
"Great legs."

Thereafter, I obligingly wore short skirts every day I worked: 3 days a week, 6 hours, enduring the misery of pantyhose. I hoped it would make up for my inefficiencies.

But I wasn't so smart or I wouldn't have taken that job. In the huge, old, black-smoke belching '57 Buick I drove up and down the coast; at least half my salary was spent on gas and oil.

The car was a gift. A friend of Art's from Synanon gave us this vehicle with its plump two-tone body and sparkly spider-cracked windshield, its frozen, driver's side door. If you could get it going, it accelerated fairly well, and could even make it up most small L.A. hills, but the minute you took your foot off the gas, a pitch-black cloud poured out from underneath the car, both front and back.

I took it to a nearby mechanic. "How much do you want to spend?" he asked. He explained that there was nothing in the car that didn't need replacing.

He made some small repairs, but eventually, we left it in an alley. I can hear car lovers gasp. We weren't up to searching for someone who'd love that wreck. Someone, somewhere got it, didn't they?

For 500$, We bought a streamlined, mint green '65 Chevy Impala which, in its sneaky, steady way, cost us over the next few years as much as a new car would have, but we had no credit, and in L.A. you need your wheels.

Between cars I gave up my Malibu job. When we got the Chevy I took a new one selling Fuller Products door to door in Santa Monica, again, part-time. My territory fell between the Pacific Palisades Park, right above the beach, and Centinela. Some of that was commercial, most was apartments for working people and retirees. The Fuller people acknowledged it wasn't a terrific territory. Only the retirees were at home in the daytimes; I wouldn't walk the streets at night. They said if I'd work full time, they'd give me a better neighborhood, rich young mothers in real houses.

I've never felt I enough time to sell my full-time to someone else, and my commissions equaled what in the long run I had gotten from the stock broker even though I'm not a good salesperson.

In those days you couldn't get a better natural bristle hair brush than the one Fuller made. My mother had had her most recent one for 15 years. I told them that, when they were home, accentuating the positive. I discovered I got a warmer reception when I was slightly tousled, casual, and wore eyeglasses than I did when I was neat and glamorous. Look 'em in the eye through the glasses.

I was relaxed and folksy in my manner, too. Allowed myself to stutter and stumble. These are my selling tips, what worked. What didn't was that I felt sorry for the innumerable lonely elderly who asked me in and offered refreshment while they studied my catalogue. They'd always buy something, the cheapest items, worthless ozone-muddying air-freshener or bubble bath, to be polite. And I always sat and chatted with them, reducing my average earnings to maybe 50 cents an hour. They talked about their families and their lives, and my weakness was that I couldn't help but be a little interested, and that kept them talking. I was always amazed by the tidiness of these tiny units and how carefully dressed and coiffed the inhabitants (mostly female) were.

Over all, my income was adequate coupled with Art's welfare, and I was as happy then as I've ever been. We were both in great shape, then, in every way. We had a car that mostly ran, a wonderful apartment, an easy life. I was working on the book with steady compulsivity and lusted hardly at all for what money could buy. We didn't live or move in circles where you had to wear certain clothes or drive a certain kind of car or "entertain" to feel comfortable. And there'd be little windfalls now and then, when Art's friend from Synanon, the drummer-entrepreneur, Lew Malin would hire him to play a "casual," a bar mitzvah or a wedding on a borrowed horn. I worked whatever hours I chose, walked through Venice taking pictures, played thrilling games of paddle tennis with Art.

We became addicts of that fast, easy game played on a smaller-than-tennis-sized-court, hitting a deadened tennis ball over a lowered net with a hole-y, heavy wooden paddle. Competing with Art was an ecstatic experience: He cared so much. In order to make the game more interesting, he'd let me win until the end and then turn into focused lightning and wallop me. Once or twice he let it go too far. I'd beat him with the only ploy I knew, and it always worked, I'd answer his bulleting ball with a dainty, forceless little plop that dropped it just over the net without a bounce. He'd rush with all his might, but never could return it.

ART PEPPER RETURNS. AGAIN.

Art told me he didn't want to play music anymore. It brought up old, bad feelings: Guilt for shitting away his life; bitterness at the racial resentment inherent in jazz -- the snide remarks from some black artists; the knife-in-the-belly envy he suffered at the successes of lesser men. These "casuals" he did were silly enough not to bother him. He'd wear a tux, get drunk, get paid. As for me, I thought he ought to do whatever he wanted when it came to music. Then somehow someone found out Art was still alive.

Fans range from enthusiastic to insane-enough-to-lay-down-their-lives. This guy back East was a fan. He was in charge of a "music clinic" offered by a university; a summer symposium on clarinet music of every category. They needed a jazz guy, and this fellow demanded they hire Art Pepper. Which was a bit odd. Art had by and large quit the clarinet for alto sax when he was 13 years old. Not entirely. During the fifties he'd recorded two or three tunes on it, highly regarded performances, and he'd "doubled" on it when he was with Kenton. But Art was amused and puzzled by this invitation. He was usually properly puffed up about his alto, and even his tenor work, but he was enchantingly humble about what he couldn't do on clarinet, which he called the really difficult instrument, and he professed profound admiration for "real" clarinetists like Artie Shaw, Buddy DeFranco.

Art borrowed a battered clarinet and went to ...Minnesota? While there he met another fan, this one representing a now obscure but then (in 1973) a pretty well-known musical instrument company named Buffet. This man, Ken Yohe (pron. "yo!") told Art he should be playing clinics all over the country at good colleges on good horns, and he, Yohe, would arrange it.

A few days after Art's return, a UPS truck pulled up and unloaded four big boxes. We ripped them open. Art's hands were shaking as he unwrapped his golden alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, his clarinet, a silver flute. He stood in the center of our big light room in a chaos of boxes and and paper. The universe had tipped its cornucopia our way.

In the book, when Art described the moment, he left out, and I didn't remind him of, another element of the scene, equally prophetic, which gives the picture the proper shading of ambiguity, making it complete.

I cut my thigh. Badly. We were using kitchen knives to open these big boxes, and in my avidity, I slipped and deeply gashed my left thigh. Blood poured over everything.

Art hated blood, couldn't bear to look at it. He hadn't yet gotten to the point of dependence where any illness or weakness in me threatened the structure of his life and equaled betrayal and he became frightened and blaming. So I saw him cringe, physically at the sight of my blood and emotionally at what it implied. That he might have to quit the ceremony of unwrapping and assembling his lovely horns and attend to me. I understood it all in a second. "No, no! It's fine, I'm fine!"
But I was afraid. I could only stop the bleeding by tying a rag so tightly around my leg my foot turned blue.
"I'd better take it to a doctor, though." In my shorts and halter top, with a bloody dish towel knotted around my thigh, I grabbed my purse and car keys and took off. Leaving Art relieved. His eyes slid impatiently back to his soul's focus, those horns.

I must have been slightly shock-y, because I only knew to drive all the way to the HMO where I had my medical insurance -- from Venice to Hollywood, about 12 miles in stiff highway traffic.

At the two/thirds point, just where a big, fast half-circle ramp leads from the Santa Monica to the Harbor Freeway, one of my tires blew. I managed to pull out of the flow of traffic and stagger from the car, and after I'd stood there for a little while, dazed and bloody, a man in a faded blue pickup stopped and took me all the way to my hospital on Sunset and Vermont. I think this Samaritan even got a tow for me.

I didn't need stitches. At the hospital they dressed and disinfected the cut. But I'd been frightened, and I could have insisted Art take me to a doctor, and he would have done it, whining the whole time. But I didn't. Art was somewhat ashamed of himself for failing to insist on taking me, and he apologized.

The pattern of our life together was set, I think, by this incident, by me -- always making his needs paramount. It was probably the first time I'd done that, and I believe it was because of the horns. Standing in the middle of the glittering mess, Art appeared to me as what he was, an artist. Suddenly he was important in a way, say, inherited royalty was once to the common folk. A trigger was pulled in me which had been planted by my grandmother (who adored Art even though he was a goy and a junkie; she looked into his eyes and knew. And when she heard his music! She lit up, joyful, speechless and amazed, tearful.)

Women through history have planted their faces in the dirt and spread their hair so heroes could have silk to walk on. I'm going to piss off a lot of people, but I believe that's natural to us, and, like nesting, it's implicit, in a general way, to the x chromosome. Some women go for warriors. More go for musicians. Reader, you know its true. I've said I didn't care what Art did, musically, but obviously I did. Everything in me operated to treat him better, to honor him -- if he was going to perform. I knew, theoretically, how important he had been, seen the awards and read the praise. Now, suddenly, it wasn't theoretical and it wasn't in the past. And the funny thing was, I still hadn't really listened to his music.

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