Read The Professor and Other Writings Online
Authors: Terry Castle,Terry Castle
Many claims, some of them vague and inflated, have been made about the linguistic originality of black American English, but in the case of Lester Young's language, such claims seem to have some substance. Buck Clayton believed Lester coined the usage of the word
“bread” to mean money, when he asked of a job, “How does the bread smell?” To express his own hurt feelings he would say he had been “bruised”âa frequently heard word in the Young vocabulary. Another favorite expression was “Ivey Divey” which signaled a rather bleak, stoic acceptance of some misfortune. Lester also used the title “Lady,” which he had bestowed on Billie Holiday, as a rather unnerving handle to the names of male friends and colleagues. It was a habit which along with his rather languid, camp manner, gave the wholly inaccurate impression that he was homosexual.
*
Especially when my mother's jabs began hitting the mark, I found myself moodily adapting some of Lester's plaints. “The other ladies make all the bread.” “I ain't groovy like the other ladies.” “Those
LRB
cats goin' to give all their reviewing gigs to the other ladies.” It was a struggle to be even halfway ivey-divey.
Art, it turned out, was my salvationâthough not in the way I expected. There's no CD player at my mother's: she's still gotâbelieve it or notâthe same wacky fake-wood-grained cabinet-style phonograph we had in the Buena Vista apartments in the 1960s. It has spindly metal legs and space-age styling and looks like something the Eameses might have designed on a not-so-good day. Granted, I can get all weepy and nostalgic just looking at the thing. Back in the eighth grade, I was so addicted to surreptitious music listening, I would get up at 6:00 a.m. and in the hour or so before I had to go to school glut myself (ever so quietly) on cherished selections from my small and eccentric LP collection. (I had to keep the volume absurdly low so not to wake up my mother or Tracy.) Prized possessions back then were a budget Everest recording of Beethoven's Seventh, the complete works of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, some huge, breakers-rolling-in-to-shore Rachmaninoff, and my favorite:
Elizabethan Lute
Songs
. (My mother noticed the record jacket of the last-mentioned one day and opined, with a strange stare, that Julian Bream and Peter Pears were “pansies.”) In my current technological fix, however, it was obvious that the ancient family sound machine wasn't up to much. The boom box was still non compos mentis. Forced to adopt emergency measuresâunder normal circumstances I loathe listening on headphonesâI ended up buying an ugly red Walkman at the Rite-Aid on the morning of Christmas Eve.
I won't say too much about
Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section
: even the most garrulous bride needs to keep a few things about her wedding night a secret. Suffice it to note that as soon as I pressed the Walkman “play” button in bed that night I started having the Parsifal Reaction: the overpowering sense that I knew the music already, that it had been laid down in my heart in advance of my ever coming into consciousness, that I was somehowâuncannilyâbringing it all into being as I listened. (Hearing the Wagner for the first time at a 1982 screening of Syberberg's adaptation, I became lost, in private druggy transport, for five straight hours.) I also knew that Art's moves were too beautiful and prodigious to absorb all in one go; I was going to have to ration him carefully in order to make him last a lifetime. Even the slightest, most gestural songs were like being delicately rocked in a cradle.
Life was warm and good!
I had to call Blakey to tell her. I quit listening on the fourth cut, “Waltz Me Blues,” quite overmastered by the handsome jailbird's groove.
I began devouring
Straight Life
the same night and by the time I fell asleep had read a good 200 pages. Like his music, Pepper's verbal style was thrilling: licentious, colloquial, and so painfully human I could hardly bear it. Christmas turned into a get-through-it blur of leftover turkey and wrapping paper: for the next forty-eight hours, till Bev and I loaded up the car again for San Francisco on the twenty-sixth, I was mainlining Art nightly without shame. True, he was Orphic and amoral and narcissistic, prone to a kind of perva
sive, mad, jazzy self-servicing. (In his introduction to the 1994 paperback reissue of
Straight Life
, the jazz critic Gary Giddins warns the reader that it is often hard to admire Pepper: “he whines, justifies, patronizes, and vilifies” and goes “overboardâ¦with intimate revelations.”) But along with the spleen and pussy lore, Pepper offered himself up with such astonishing vulnerability I found my eyes welling up repeatedly. I read away at a frenetic bebop paceâuptempo all the wayâbut also felt curiously mangled by the experience: inwardly appalled to realize just how contemptuous I could be, I'm afraid, toward people less fortunate or comfortable than myself. Yes, I had survivedâ
almost fifty and not dead yet!
âbut at what cost? In my professional life I was becoming a mini bigwig. (Or perhaps a biggish mini wig.) So why in middle age was I still so frightened and so cruel? The usual cozy, bespectacled, reading-in-bed smirk kept getting wiped off my face.
Some of it was just the chastening rush of the style: so plain, blatant, and free. Startlingly, the epigraph to
Straight Life
was from Pound. “What is the use of talking and there is no end of talking. There is no end of things in the heart.” But Pepper (or his amanuensis, Laurie) might easily have chosen something from Defoe or Swift, so blunt and Anglo-Saxon, pitiless and fine, his narrative of life's enormities. From the first pages on, a short dispassionate sketch of the shipwreck of his childhood, Pepper goes straight indeed to the heart of things that have no end:
During this period we lived in Watts, and my father continued going to sea. He hated my mother for what she had tried to do [abort her baby]. She was going out with this Betty; I don't know what they did. They'd drink. I'd be left alone. The only time I was shown any affection was when my mother was just sloppy drunk, and I could smell her breath. She would slobber all over me.
One time when my father had been at sea for quite a while he came
home and found the house locked and me sitting on the front porch, freezing cold and hungry. She was out somewhere. She didn't know he was coming. He was drunk. He broke the door down and took me inside and cooked me some food. She finally came home, drunk, and he cussed her out. We went to bed. I had a little crib in the corner, and my dad wanted to get in bed with me. He didn't want to sleep with her. She kept pulling on him, but he pushed her away and called her names. He started beating her up. He broke her nose. He broke a couple of ribs. Blood poured all over the floor. I remember the next day I was scrubbing up blood, trying to get the blood up for ages.
After his parents split up, he relates, he was shunted off to his grandmother's, to the tiny redneck town where she lived with an aged swain:
Nuevo was a country hamlet. Children should enjoy places like that, but I was so preoccupied with the city and with people, with wanting to be loved and trying to find out why other people were loved and I wasn't, that I couldn't stand the country because there was nothing to see. I couldn't find out anything there. Still, to this day, when I'm in the country I feel this loneliness. You come face to face with a reality that's so terrible. This was a little farm out in the wilderness. There was this old guy, her second husband, I think. I don't even remember him he was so inconsequential. And there was the wind blowing.
(Not so far off again: I remember a hot dusty day in the mid-sixties when my mother drove us out to Poway see a friend of hers, a young woman named Donna, our former downstairs neighbor, who'd moved out of the apartments with her newborn baby when her husband Mike had shipped out to Vietnam. She'd found a kind of shack on a brush-covered slope where the rent was only fifty dollars a month, cheaper
even than the apartments. Poway is a strip-mall suburb now, looped around with freeway sound walls and indistinguishable from the rest of the eastern San Diego County sprawl, but in 1966 the feeling of rural desolation was just as Pepper describes. I spent the afternoon reading
The Hobbit
and scratching in the dirt with a stick.)
Pepper's account of his early jazz and dope life, complete with stark portraits of some of the greatest talents of the era getting high and getting off (and often not getting back), was shocking in its matter-of-factness:
I was hanging around with Dexter Gordon. We smoked pot and took Dexedrine tablets, and they had inhalers in those days that had little yellow strips of paper in them that said “poison,” so we'd put these strips in our mouths, behind our teeth. They really got you roaring as an upper: your scalp would tingle, and you'd get chills all over, and then it would center in your head and start ringing around. You'd feel as if your whole head was lifting off. I was getting pretty crazy, and right about that time, I think, Dexter started using smack, heroin.
And he was upfrontâsometimes brutallyâabout yearning to imitate the flip, dandyish, hipster style that Gordon and other black postwar players cultivated so effortlessly:
Dexter Gordon was an idol around Central Avenue. He was tall. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that made him seem like he was about seven feet tall. He had a stoop to his walk and wore long zoot suits, and he carried his tenor in a sack under his arm. He had these heavy-lidded eyes; he always looked loaded, he always had a little half smile on his face. And everybody loved him. All the black cats and chicks would say, “Heeeeeey, Dex!” you know, and pat him on the back, and bullshit with him. I used to stand around and marvel
at the way they talked. Having really nothing to say, they were able to play these little verbal games back and forth. I envied it, but I was too self-conscious to do it. What I wouldn't give to just jump in and say those things. I could when I was joking to myself, raving to myself, in front of the mirror at home, but when it came time to do it with people I couldn't.
Here, with a jolt, I saw him pin it down: the mortifying craving I (still) had for a certain uncensored verbal fluency. Nothing worse than the puerile, inhibited, what-an-idiot-I-am sensation you get when the words don't come out in time and the world, blast it to hell, has moved on. And yet here he was acknowledging the failure, and in the process somehow exorcizing it. It struck me that one wish impelling autobiography since Rousseau must in fact be just this: the hope of pulling outâhowever unexpectedlyâsome last-minute psychic victory over
l'esprit de l'escalier
.
This said, I have to admit that what enthralled me most about
Straight Life
were the sex parts. From the beginning Art could be counted on to go way,
way
too far:
I had my first sexual experience I can remember when I was four or five. I was still living with my parents in Watts. They had some friends who lived nearby, Mary and Mike, who had a daughter, Francie, about four years older than me. Francie was slender, she had black hair, she had little bangs cut across and a pretty face, and she had a look about her of real precociousness. She had a devilish look about her, and she was very warm. Hot. She had nice lips, her teeth were real white, a pink tongue, and her cunt was pink and clean. A lot of little girls smell acid or stale, butâ¦I remember sometimes we'd be playing together on the front lawnâthere would be other kids aroundâand she would sit on my face in her little bloomers; nobody acted like they noticed anything. She's sit
ting there, and I'm sniffing her ass and her cunt and her bloomers, and it always smelled real nice and sweet.
“Years and years later, when I was divorced from my first wife,” he remarks, “I ran into Francie, and I wanted to ball her, but she was in love and she wouldn't do it.”
As an adult, Pepper screwed compulsively: waitresses and cocktail hostesses, women he met in all-night theaters, errant members of his teenage fan club, a female prison clerk at San Quentin, druggie chicks. He even went through a period as a Peeping Tom. (Once, he says, he espied a woman masturbating in her bathroom and watched her intently till he came in a burst, “all over my shorts and the top of my pants.” When she suddenly turned toward himâhe was peeking in through a high windowâhe jumped down in a hurry and hied off down the street.) “Sex was in my thoughts all the time,” he admits, “and because of my upbringing I felt it was evil. That made it even more attractive to me, and the alcohol and the pills I took made my sex drive even stronger. I was obsessed.”
An especially filthy yarn he recountsâabout seducing a hotel maid when he was on the road with Stan Kentonâreminded me of the time when I came home from junior high and found Hopper, one of the pre-Turk boyfriends, asleep and nude and snuffling in the little single bedroom that my mother and sister and I then shared. (This must have been on Waco Street.) It was only three in the afternoon but Hopper obviously had had a lot to drink and was sleeping it off. Maybe he was afraid that if he went back to the Navy base he'd get busted back down to Seaman Third Class. (As a twelve-year-old, I was obsessed with such details of service life. The whole setup sounded marvelous to me.) In Art's story, the maid, a pretty young Latina woman, arrives one morning to clean the room when he is sitting in his bathrobe, hung over and bleary after a hard night of bingeing and blowing:
She had green eyes. I'll never forget that, black hair and green eyes. I sat in a chair opposite the bathroom door. The door had a full-length mirror on it, and it was opened in such a way that I could see her in the mirror, but I was half in a daze. I really wasn't paying much attention because I had a heavy hangover. When I woke up I always had a hangover, and if I could get to a bar, I'd have a Bloody Mary. If not, I'd have a few shots in my room. So I was having a drink when I looked up and looked into this mirror, and I couldn't believe my eyes. She was cleaning the toilet bowl. She was standing, bent over but with her knees straight, which caused her dress to come up almost over her rear end, and she had black lace panties on, and I could see the beginning of this little mound and some wispy black hairs sticking out the sides of these little panties. She had gorgeous legs. It was a beautiful sight, and I thought, “This is too good to be true!” When she came in, she'd closed the door behind her. Some of them leave the door open a little bit. When they leave it open you've got to sneak over and try to push it closed and catch their reaction if there is one. You hope there's no reaction.
I went and stood in the bathroom door, just looking at her. She's cleaning away. After she finishes the toilet she bends over to get the floor. She's wearing one of those half-brassieres, and with that button loose, I can see her breasts. I can see everything but the nipples. I can see down her dress to her navel. Needless to say I've got an erection. I move a little closer to her and she bends over the bathtub, and her uniform is all the way up over her ass. It was too much for me. I had my drink in my left hand; I put my right hand inside my robe and started playing with myself. If you can picture thisâ¦I'm standing in the bathroom right behind this beautiful creature who's bent over so her ass is practically in my face, with those lace panties, with hair sticking out of the panties, and I'm jerking myself off, and I came that way, and as soon as I came I looked down, and she was
looking at me through her legs. Her hand was on her cunt, and she was rubbing her cunt.