Art had considerable charm. Intelligence, a very natural ability to understand things. He was a very handsome man. A great natural talent. These are attractive qualities. His humor tended to burlesque. It could be vicious. Mimicking people. And often very accurately, very perceptively, with the intelligence working. But mostly, it was burlesque. Sometimes playing hillbilly music he’d shout, “Tarnation!” and “Shit fire and save matches!” Hahahaha!
Art is sensitive even though at times the sensitivity is largely an expression of selfishness. He’s sensitive to such a degree about himself. A person can be like this and be insensitive to other people at times. Not always. Often he could be very warm and very friendly, and you could talk to him. At times his concern for other people would be expressed as sentimentality: “I really love you, man.” Even histrionics. Being stoned and being emotional. But I question whether at any time the concern with the self was ever put aside.
I saw a definite change in Art when he started using heroin. It was rather dramatic. The change, I think, consisted essentially in the intensification and exacerbation of traits that were already there: indulgence in the self, a desire to escape the external world, reality, to sink into the self almost entirely. To be passive. As a musician . . . In the case of Art, the musician is a person who expresses himself and does send something out, but even this could be passive at times. It showed in feelings of intimidation in the presence of another strong musician, a reluctance to blow out if there was somebody around, another strong player, or in one of these very sticky social scenes in jazz, tribal games, “Who’s number one?” Heroin intensified Art’s tendencies to withdraw, not to fight, not to assert. And that was the easiest thing to do at the moment, although it made his life more difficult in the long run.
I was able to use heroin from time to time just for fun. I think we all have a predisposition in our systems for certain types of behavior and certain drugs. With some people, you know, booze is really their messiah, their mission, their destiny; they’re just going to be soakedl I didn’t have the need for heroin. I don’t know why. I got off scot-free. At times I had the need to get stoned, whacked, and I thought of taking heroin for that purpose, but it was never the heroin itself. It was never love. Deep, natural, flowing love.
Art said to me once that all of his life all he’d really ever wanted was to get high. And the first time he stuck that needle in his arm he said, “I finally got high.”
| 6 | On the Road with Stan Kenton’s Band1946–1952 |
AFTER I SNIFFED IT that morning in Chicago, I bought up a whole bunch of heroin, got a sackful of caps. We traveled back to Los Angeles. I guess it took us three months to get back, playing all the stops in between, and at this time we had a little vacation from Stan, about a month before we had to go out again. I told Patti I had sniffed a little bit, but it was okay, it was alright. She felt bad but she went along with it. Then I ran out. I got totally depressed and my stomach hurt. My nose hurt something awful, terrible headaches; my nose started bleeding. I was getting chills. I was vomiting. And the joints in my legs hurt.
I had to go to a session so I got hold of some codeine pills and some sleeping pills and some bennies, and I got a bottle of cough syrup and drank it, and I went out to this session because I still couldn’t believe I was that sick.
Everything was real clear to me. Everything was so vivid. I felt that I was seeing life for the first time. Before, the world had been clouded; now, it was like being in the desert and looking at the sky and seeing the stars after living in the city all your life. That’s the way everything looked, naked, violently naked and exposed. That’s the way my body felt, my nerves, my mind. There was no buffer, and it was unbearable. I thought, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?”
I looked around the club and saw this guy there, Blinky, that I knew. He was a short, squat guy with a square face, blue eyes; he squinted all the time; when he walked he bounced; and he was always going ‘Tchk! Tchk!”—moving his head in jerky little motions like he was playing the drums. Sometimes when he walked he even looked like a drum set: you could see the sock cymbal bouncing up and down and the foot pedal going and the cymbals shaking and his eyes would be moving. But it wasn’t his eyes; it was that his whole body kind of blinked. He’d been a friend of mine for years and I knew he goofed around occasionally with horse, heroin, so I started talking. I said, “Man, I really feel bad. I started sniffing stuff on the road and I ran out.” I described to him a little bit of how I felt and he said, “Ohhhh, man!” I said, “How long is this going to last?” He said, “You’ll feel like this for three days; it’ll get worse. And then the mental part will come on after the physical leaves and you’ll be suffering for over a week, unbearable agony.” I said, “Do you know any place where I can get anything?” He said, “Yeah, but it’s a long ways away. We have to go to Compton.” We were in Glendale. At that time they didn’t have the freeway system; it was a long drive but I said, “Let’s go.” We drove out to Sid’s house.
As we drove I thought, “God almighty, this is it. This is what I was afraid of.” And the thought of getting some more stuff so I wouldn’t feel that way anymore seemed so good to me I got scared that something would happen before we got there, that we’d have a wreck. So I started driving super cautious, but the more cautious I was the harder it seemed to be to control the car. The sounds of the car hurt me. I could feel the pain it must be feeling in the grinding of the gears and the wheels turning and the sound of the motor and the brakes. But I drove, and we made it, and we went inside, and I was shaking all over, quivering, thinking how great it would be to get something so I wouldn’t feel the way I felt.
Sid was a drummer also, not a very good drummer, but he had a good feeling for time. He was a guy I’d known a long time, too, a southern type cat with a little twang of an accent. We went in and Blinky told Sid I’d started goofing around and Sid said, “Ohhhh, boy! Join the club!” He said, “What do you want?” I said, “I don’t know. I just want some so I won’t be sick.” He said, “Where do you fix at?” I said, “I don’t fix. I just sniff it, you know, horn it.” He said, “Oh, man, I haven’t got enough for that!” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “If you want to shoot some, great, but I’m not going to waste it. I don’t have that much.” I said, “Oh, man, you’ve got to, this is horrible. You’ve got to let me have something!” He said, “No, I won’t do it. It’s wasted by sniffing it. It takes twice as much, three times as much. If you’d shoot it you could take just a little bit and keep straight.” I said, “I don’t want to shoot it. I know if I shoot it I’m lost.” And he said, “You’re lost anyway man.” I begged him and begged him. I couldn’t possibly leave that place feeling as sick as I did. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t care what happened afterwards, I just had to have a taste. Finally I said, “Okay, I’ll shoot it.” He said, “Great.”
They both fixed, and I had to wait. At last he asked me what I wanted. I asked him how they sold it. He said they sold it in grams: a gram was ten number-five caps for twenty dollars. I said to give me a gram and he said, “Whatever you want.” I said, “I thought you only had just a little bit.” He said, “I only have a little bit but I got enough.” It was just the idea that he wanted me to fix. I knew that. So I’d be in the same misery as he was. He said, “Where do you want to go?” I looked around my arms. I didn’t want to go the mainline, the vein at the crook inside your arm, because that’s where the police always looked, I’d heard, for marks. I asked him if he could hit me in the spot between the elbow and the wrist, the forearm.
Sid put a cap or a cap and a half of powder into the spoon. He had an eyedropper with a rubber bulb on it, but he had taken thread and wrapped it around the bulb so it would fit tight around the glass part. He had a dollar bill. Here came the dollar bill again, but this time instead of rolling it up as a funnel he tore a teeny strip off the end of it and wrapped it around the small end of the dropper so the spike would fit over it real tight. That was the “jeep.” He put about ten drops of water on top of the powdered stuff in the spoon and took a match and put it under