Life, Straight

Why do we enjoy – and the appropriateness of that verb is what this posting is all about – reading about suffering? One answer, of course, is the pleasure of sadism. Related to sadism is the vulgar frisson even the non-sadistic among us experience reading descriptions of human suffering, especially when its victims are those we believe deserve to suffer. No one is immune to such feelings, though witnessing pain vicariously and enjoying the sensation amounts to moral slumming.

Another explanation, one many religious people would endorse, is that suffering can be edifying. Christ’s agony on the cross is the embodiment of his message. Suffering can serve as penance, as moral witness (think of the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in Vietnam), and as a goad to humility. In a related though vulgarized form, this idea turns into the cult of victimhood, in which one’s suffering, real or imagined, is worn proudly as a badge of honor, a sign of one’s privileged status. Suffering confers bragging rights, the antithesis of humility.

Here’s a description of suffering, physical and moral, without a hint of sadism (or masochism), edification or self-preening victimhood:

“I finally quit the glue sniffing, but I kept taking black-and-whites. I’d take sixteen or eighteen of them every morning in my cell with my coffee. With black-and-whites you lose your equilibrium. You fall down and run into things. There were three or four of us who’d been taking them, hanging out together. One day I was sitting with these guys on the yard, sitting on one of the domino tables, and I dropped my cigarette. I went to pick it up. I bent down and fell off the table. I cut my head and got all bloody. When blood is drawn it’s a serious thing. The guards think you’ve killed somebody somebody’d shanked you, so my friend stood around me while one of them got a wet rag and cleaned my forehead. I’m goofing around and right away I fall off the table again and hit my head in the same place. Now, they get a guy to sneak in the hospital and get some bandages to stop the bleeding. That night we’re all lined up to go into our cells. I get into line, and we round a little bend. I go to take a step and I step too high. I fall back, hitting my head on the cement. The guards rush out and grab me and take me to the hospital. They interrogate me. Finally they put me back in my cell. The next morning walking out of my cell on the fourth tier, I walked straight out and smashed into a bar. If I hadn’t hit the bar I would have fallen over and killed myself.”

As Beckett writes in Endgame, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” The above passage is from Straight Life, the autobiography of Art Pepper, the great alto saxophone player. It is the best book I know written by a jazz musician. It is also a chronicle of almost unrelieved suffering, from child abuse, heroin addiction and other drug abuse, and the degradations of prison and the criminal life. Pepper became addicted to heroin in 1950 when he was 25 years old (he was already alcoholic), was arrested in 1953, and for the next 13 years spent more time in prison than not. After five years in San Quentin, Pepper hit bottom and put himself in Synanon. He joined a methadone program, remarried and, near the end of his life, wrote this book and resumed playing and recording. Pepper died in 1982 at the age of 57.

When Whitney Balliett reviewed Straight Life in The New Yorker in 1980, he juxtaposed a passage from Pepper’s book with one from Henry Mayhew’s London Poor, and concluded that, “Pepper has the ear and memory and interpretive lyricism of a first-rate novelist.”

Here’s how Balliett finishes his review: “He has no illusions. (`And that’s what I will die as – a junkie.’) Nor does he have any remorse or self-pity. He has lived the inverse of the straight life, and he has lived it as well as he knows how. He does not rail against the laws that treat addicted human beings as criminals: the straight world has its hang-ups. He is an eloquent and gifted man.”

Part of the answer to the first question I asked – Why do we enjoy reading about suffering? – is a matter of motivation: I read Art Pepper’s book not because he suffered but because he was a great musician who happened to live a life filled with pain – as well as much pleasure and, rarely, joy. Junkie Lit – someone must already have christened the genre – holds no attraction. Pepper never indulges in the romantic mystique of the suffering artist. He never claims to have suffered for his art. He makes no excuses and expects none from his readers. He never poses as a hero. He never got entirely straight and, at the end of the book, even sings the qualified praises of cocaine. Here’s what he says on the book’s second-to-last page:

“I was given a gift. I was given a gift in a lot of ways. I was given a gift of being able to endure things, to accept certain things, to be able to accept punishment for the things I did wrong against society, the things that society feels were wrong. And I was able to go to prison. I never informed on anyone. As for music, anything I’ve done has been something that I’ve done `off the top.’ I’ve never studied, never practiced. I’m one of those people, I knew it was there. All I had to do was reach for it, just do it.”