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Already a user of alcohol, marijuana and various pills, he started taking heroin while on tour with Kenton. It gave him the only relief he could find from the sexual anxieties, craving for affection, anger and self-doubt that raged inside him. "If this is what it takes," he decided, "then this is what I'm going to do, whatever dues I have to pay."
Pay he did. Over the next 16 years, because of narcotics convictions (and his refusal to buy his freedom by informing on other junkies), he spent more time in prison than out, including two terms in San Quentin. His wife divorced him. He remarried, but his second wife became suicidal over losing him to drugs, then decided to join him by becoming an addict herself. Later, after their estrangement, she died of cancer. Although Pepper played sporadically with top groups and managed to cut some notable albums (Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, Art Pepper Plus Eleven), he sank deeper into the junkie underworld. When he could find no work and had run out of instruments and other possessions to sell, he turned to burglary to support his habit. His days became a deadly cycle of stealing, scoring, shooting up and sleeping; sometimes he awoke to find the needle from his last fix still stuck in his arm.
In 1968 he resurfaced briefly in Buddy Rich's big band, but had to quit when he was hospitalized with a ruptured spleen (the result of a congenital blood disease). Sick, broke and mortally exhausted, he finally checked himself into the Synanon rehabilitation center in Santa Monica. When he told a doctor what his daily intake was (heroin, Numorphan, uppers, sleeping pills and a gallon of wine), the physician said: "It's a wonder you're still alive."
Pepper looks back on the Synanon program as no more than a mixed success except in one respect: it brought him together with Fellow Resident Laurie Miller, a Berkeley-educated photographer. After Pepper left the center in 1971 and enrolled in a methadone program, she joined him in a rented two-bedroom house out side Los Angeles. With Laurie serving as bolsterer, buffer, secretary and manager, he began again the long, tortuous climb toward his rightful place in jazz. There were lapses back into drugs and illness, but he kept trying. He resumed recording in 1975 and made his first appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1977. He toured Japan in 1978 and 1979.
Today, says Pepper, except for gradually diminishing doses of methadone and an antidepressant, he is off all drugs, including alcohol. He is suffering from, among other things, cirrhosis of the liver and a hernia that his physical condition makes inoperable. He figures that "each performance I give could be my last." This, plus his wife's constant presence, is what convinces him that he will finally be able to stick to the straight life after so many failures. "I've had so much time taken away from me, and there's not much left," he says. "I want to do it now. I have to do it now."
—Christopher Porterfield