2003 Castle Pepper 1970s

Terry Castle My Heroin ChristmasLondon Review of Books, 18 December 2003, 11 - 18. 2003, 1994, 1982, 1979, 1970s,

A commentary on Art Pepper's autobiography Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper, 1979, reissued in paperback in 1994, and relates that in the early seventies Art Pepper spent several years at Synonon.

     ". . . Pepper managed to get himself into Synanon, (the celebrated Santa Monica rehabilitation centre and Atlas Shrugged-style beach commune. He lived there for several years in the early 1970s and met Laurie, a fellow resident who became his third wife. He gradually cleaned up - at least partially - and began a heroic if truncated musical comeback. He made some new records, started touring again, and as a quasi-rehabilitated éminence grise, gave jazz workshops at colleges and universities . . .

     "He began dictating Straight Life to Laurie . . . asked some of his old bandmates, producers, drug dealers, prison cronies and girlfriends to add their . . . comments. The resulting feuilleton was hailed as a poetic masterpiece: a riffing, scabrous, West Coast Season in Hell. . . . Though mostly off junk, Pepper continued to consume pills in great quantities and shot up, quite brazenly, with coke and methadone to the last days of his life. He died in Panorama, California, of an exploding brain, in June 1982, at the age of 56." p. 12

     "All the more surprising, then, the pathos the writer achieves when he describes courting Laurie, his last and 'greatest love,' at Synanon in the 1970s. Synanon itself - the most celebrated rehab programme of its day - sounds like a Southern California cult nightmare: all rules and regulations and not being able to go to the bathroom without permission. At the Santa Monica 'campus' - where Pepper lived for two years - there were the usual cult trappings: a charismatic guru (named Chuck) and army of live-in disciples; elaborate rewards and punishments for performing (or neglecting) communal household chores; and daily Khmer Rouge-style group therapy sessions in which the goal was to drive your fragile fellow addicts into a state of mental meltdown.

     "You'd be in a game with ten or fifteen people and if somebody, like pissed on the toilet seat in their dorm or something like that, you'd tell it You'd accuse him of it in front of the girls. When your covers are pulled in front of women it's really a drag, so there'd be some wild shouting matches. They made up a lot of things, too, just to get you mad, to get you raving. Somebody'd accuse you of farting at night so loud they couldn't sleep, or some chick would accuse some broad of throwing a bloody Kotex in the corner of the bathroom, leaving it laying there. The idea was that rank{l}ing you and exposing your bad habits would make you eventually change. And it worked, you know, it worked."

     ". . . After staying sober and drug-free for some time, male and female Synanon residents who wanted to start a sexual relationship could petition the counsellors to let them go on 'dates' together - little walks around the neighborhood, trips to the nearby shopping mall, chaste bike rides. The formal courtship period accomplished, they might then request permission to spend a couple of hours together in the commune's designated trysting place . . . " p. 15

     "On their first official date, he and Laurie sit on a bench and watch the carousel.

     "In the end one gets the feeling that Pepper is just too much . . . the old guy has to be defended against; not only for playing the sax, doping up and balling chicks to startling excess, but for describing it so unambiguously, with the ludic genius of a trailer-park Villon. He's an out landish daddy-o from some time before les neiges d'antan- if Southern California can indeed be said to have had them." p. 16

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 Kelyn Roberts 2017