Ball (Part One: Art and Laurie Pepper's "Straight Life")

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Since yesterday, I have been reading Straight Life by jazz musician Art Pepper and his wife, Laurie Pepper. I have heard about this book since its publication in 1980. Still, due to my current fascination with the Jazz World, especially in Los Angeles, this combination of memoir and oral history is a remarkable document on Jazz Musicians' lives, especially when it concerns sex and narcotics. I’m not even on page 200, and I think this may be one of the greatest books I have ever read.

I’m 69 years old, and when I went to high school, we had sex and we balled. Or if we are having sex, we are balling. I bring this up because Art Pepper uses that term for sex throughout the first 100 pages of the book, and I haven’t heard this vocabulary since my High School years. Before heroin addiction, Art was really into balling. Either his first wife or the various girls he met on tour or on the road. To chill out his horniness, he tried heroin to feed the urge within him. And that is where I left off with this book.

I connect the terminology balling with my era's rock n’ roll music. And as teenagers, we used that word a lot compared to other words, such as screwing, although all of us knew what that meant. Screwing or to screw came from the 18th century due to the twisting and turning of the sexual act. By the 20th century, it was the common slang for sex and became popular with the counter-culture groupings throughout that century. One rarely (at least in my social circle) hears the word balling, and I totally forgot that slang word until I started reading Straight Life.

The description of various balling sessions, as well as what it is like to get that first high from Heroin, as well as getting sick from the drug, and his time in the Army and Prison are livid with many layers of describing the sensations of such confinement and sickness, with the pleasure. I’m presuming that Laurie Pepper is the one who organized the book, and she (or whoever) did a magnificent job. Art (and Laurie) is the Marcel Proust of the Jazz/narcotics world. Like Proust, nothing is missed, and although it's first-person narration, it feels like the ultimate picture of the situation, and one is not going to get a better description or understanding of what is taking place in front of Art. And I haven’t even finished the book yet!

I presume that Art and others are honest, but that is unimportant to me. What is important is how the tale is told and how it draws the reader into a world that is scary, exciting, and profoundly sad all at once. The book is a pure ball.