Straight Life (21 page)

9

The U.S. Public Health
Service Hospital at
Fort Worth

1953 - 1954

THERE WERE THREE PEOPLE from the L.A. County jail and a couple of people from San Diego, five of us altogether, that went on the chain. The U.S. marshals took us. We went down to the Union Station and they put us on the train. We had a pullman; it was the law; they had to give you a pullman if you were going to be traveling more than twenty-four hours. They paired us off. I drew a dope fiend from San Diego named Kantola; his name came before mine alphabetically. We were put together in one bunk. They had leg irons on us and we had to sleep that way, in a top bunk, and Kantola was sick.

When we went to eat they took the leg irons off and put us in handcuffs. We walked into the dining car and sat down; one of us had to eat with our left hand and the other with our right. People were staring at us so I played the role, like I was a big gangster. I had a double-breasted suit on with a white shirt, and I took my tie off, and I was very handsome. I gave people cold looks, the porters, and if chicks would stare at us I'd give them evil looks. You could act any way you wanted because nobody could bother you-you had the guards there. So you'd glare at people and they'd look away because they'd be scared.

We got off the train at Fort Worth, and they lined us up and put chains around our stomachs and handcuffs on our wrists. They drove us out to the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, a little ways out of town on a big hill. We went into a building and down in an elevator, and that was the last time I would be outside for nine months. It was nine months before I got an outdoors pass. You walked to the different buildings through underground tunnels. There were three hundred addicts and eight hundred mental patients who were connected with the coast guard, their families-people who had lost their minds or were in the process of losing them.

We got there on a Sunday. There was no activity and nobody around. We went through the different stages of getting booked in and of course it was nothing like the county jail. I thought, "Maybe this will be good for me." I had messed up everything, and as far as my playing, nothing was happening right anyway, so I started thinking, "Maybe I'll be able to straighten out, and when I get out everything will be like it was before. Again. And I'll be back with Patti. And I'll enjoy playing." Two years seemed like an awful long time, but I'd spent three and a half years in the army. And there was always a chance of making parole after a part of my time was up.

The buildings were tall and there were about seven of them. One big building had all the administration offices in it and the doctors' offices, where the psychiatrists did their work. There was a building for the women and three for the extreme mental patients. Part of one building was a school, and part of another had a regular hospital in it. These buildings were spread out over a large area and were joined by the tunnels. We went to 201, the place they took the newcomers to see what kind of shape we were in. Me and Kantola told them we were sick. They really didn't believe me. I didn't appear to be sick. But I wanted to get some dope and if you were sick they took you off with liquid methadone, liquid Dolophine they called it, and they had chloral hydrate to make you sleep at night. If you were really in bad shape they'd give you morphine a few times, but all I got was one little taste of methadone and one little taste of chloral hydrate, and then they wouldn't give me anything more because I had come there from the county jail and they knew I was alright.

There were a lot of people in there who'd been getting stuff for ages. These were people who came in off the streets to kick. They'd sign themselves in and stay sixty or ninety days and then they'd leave. We called them "winders." We talked a couple of these guys into giving us a taste of their medicine. They had to drink it in front of somebody, but they'd put it in their mouths and act like they'd swallowed it and then come back and spit into a cup, and we'd drink it. It was kind of nasty, but when you want dope it really doesn't seem to be very nasty.

We stayed a while getting physical examinations, and then they assigned us to the place where we were going to do our time. It was like a dormitory. It had a big dayroom and another room with rows of bunkbeds separated by little, five-foot boards, making cubicles, two guys to a cubicle.

In the morning a bell would ring and we'd get up, go to the bathroom, wash and dress, and walk down to breakfast. The mess hall was in another building, quite a ways from where I was staying, so I'd walk through the tunnels with the nut patients. They'd be shuffling along with their hands in their pockets and their heads hanging down, and every now and then I'd see one of them standing in a corner, peeing against the wall. I'd walk into the mess hall, and we, the fiends, would eat on one side, and they, the nuts, would eat on the other. The food was very good.

I was lucky in Fort Worth. When I got there, there were very few musicians and eventually they appointed me head of the music department. It really wasn't a department, but they had to have somebody to order things, so every now and then I'd make up an order for reeds and drumsticks and things like that. Then I started doing a little teaching and it was good because instead of cleaning the tunnels or working in the kitchen I got to work in the music room. I'd go to the band room in the morning, sweep the floor, clean the place, and make sure everything was locked up, and then I'd get out my horn. I'd close the door in this little room and just sit there and practice. I did that every day, and it was the first time I'd ever practiced, and I really got down with music. Then I formed a little group. I got a drummer and a bass player, who weren't very good, and a piano-the piano player was very good, a guy named Abdullah Kenne- brew, who was black and short, and we argued all the time. The piano had wheels on it so we could roll it. We had a little cart to carry the drums and bass and we'd go around and play for different wards. We'd play in the closed wards for the mental patients. We'd walk in and set up in a corner and just start playing, no announcement or anything. We were a regular jazz group, and we played bebop, and the patients had no idea what we were doing.

Each patient had his own little thing. There was one guy who just walked around making the sign of the cross. He'd bow down on one knee as if he was praying and mumble. They had a bench that extended all around the dayroom, and one guy would sit there and count money all the time; every now and then he'd put his fingers to his mouth and wet them as if he was counting bills. Then there were catatonics, who would just stand in one position and never move, and there were people who'd sit or lie on the floor and play with their toes. Now and then, there would be one that would look at you, but as soon as you looked back, he'd turn away and giggle and hide behind a table or something.

We played, and while we played I noticed that almost all of them showed some signs of hearing the music, moving their feet or some part of their bodies in a semblance of the rhythm we were playing in. Some of them would even smile-a silly smile. And that showed us that what we were doing was getting through to them. I talked to the aides and the nurses and asked them if they thought we were doing any good, if there was any point to it, and they said that they thought there was because on the days we played, they found that the patients were a lot more manageable; there were less violent flare-ups. It was as if we anaesthetized them with our music.

One day a week, sometimes twice a week, we'd play in the women's section. These were the wives and daughters of people in the coast guard. A lot of the women, I was told, had syphilis, cases that had progressed to the stage where, when they were finally aware of the fact that they had it, it was beyond cure. The nurses and doctors said that in the end the patients got to the point where they would have to be locked in a cell, to die there a horrible death, writhing and beating themselves against the padded cell, ripping at their bodies.

We'd play for these women and it was sad in actuality, when you look back at it, but at the time it seemed very funny. There was one woman, about twenty-eight, and I noticed that if you looked at her, she'd get excited; she'd really get frantic. So I'd be playing and she'd be standing, her left hand grabbing at her stomach, bunching up her robe, and I'd stare at her, and the longer I looked ... She'd start shaking all over; she'd stamp her feet; she'd start screaming and calling me names: "You son-ofa-bitch!" And then I'd stop, but I couldn't help doing it again and again. There was another girl. She had long, black hair, and I guess at one time she was sort of pretty, but she was really wasted. This girl would lie on a couch while we played. Once while I was playing I happened to look over at her, and I noticed she was staring at me. I looked away. I played. I looked back again, and I saw her glance around to see where the nurse was. When she saw that the nurse wasn't looking, she took her robe and opened it up, and she had nothing on underneath. There she was, just lying there with the robe pulled back and her legs spread. She was looking at me and I was looking at her and then all of a sudden she closed the robe. She'd keep opening it and closing it, and a couple of times the nurse saw her and made her stop.

I started taking nutmeg. They had tunnel crews that cleaned at 2, 3, 4 A.M., when all the action stopped. They'd wash down the tunnels with big hoses and scrub them because the mental patients would urinate against the walls and sometimes shit on the sides. These guys brought papers of nutmeg and mace smuggled in by the guards, and I took it because it was very difficult to get anything else.

They sold it in penny matchboxes; one box cost four packs of cigarettes. You'd put it in a glass with hot water and stir it up. It wouldn't dissolve: it would kind of float around. It was very hard to drink. I gradually increased the amount I took and finally got up to four matchboxes a day. The guy would wake me at about four in the morning and give me the nutmeg. I'd get up, go to the bathroom, put it in my glass, get it down without gagging, and then go back to sleep. I'd wake up again at about 6:30 or seven, when they rang the bell, and by the time I was ready to go to breakfast the nutmeg was hitting me and I'd really be sailing. It makes you feel like exceptionally good pot; you giggle; you laugh; everything is insanely comical. I'd walk down the tunnel with another guy (we'd take it together), and we'd pass the mental patients walking with their eyes on the ground, dragging their feet. We'd pass the one that was praying and the other one counting the money, and we'd start laughing. Sometimes five or six of us would take it at once. We'd go to the mess hall and rush to the table. They'd have coffee on the table in a big pot, and it was really delicious. We'd put our trays down and sit, and by the time we'd finished one cup of coffee we'd be completely out of it, goofing around, acting crazy. That's at about seven o'clock in the morning. And I did this every day for about six months at one period. It's a wonder I didn't kill myself.

The nutmeg made you think about sex. The bad thing about Fort Worth-it was both good and bad-there were a lot of women there. Every sixty days a different group of student nurses came in. They'd be going to different hospitals for their training. They'd be seventeen, eighteen years old, walking around in short uniforms, walking through the tunnels. There were also the women that worked in the administration building, office women who dressed real sexy-you could see them wandering around; then there were the nurses and the Grey Ladies and the Red Cross. So all kinds of intrigue went on. People would be hiding, staring at women. I guess a third of the addicts were Puerto Ricans. The Puerto Ricans used to stick little mirrors on their shoes: a guy would go to the library and stand by some chick; he'd have the pockets cut out of his pants, you know, and he'd put his foot underneath the girl's dress and play with himself.

There was a choir and a lady who came out to give choir practice who was very pretty. She had brownish-blonde hair that came down to her shoulders, and she wore lipstick and rouge and had her eyebrows plucked and everything. She was a southern belle. She had pretty skin coloring, sort of like a peach. She'd wear a sweater that was cut low or a white silk blouse with one of the buttons loose and a low-cut bra, and she'd always manage to get in a position where you could see her breasts. If she got anywhere near you she'd rub her ass against your leg or something, but real innocent, and she kind of flapped her eyelids at you. She had blue eyes and she'd give you this look.

She led the choir, and I sang with them a few times, and I noticed that she was flirting with me a little bit. Then one day she said, "Oh, would you stick around after? I want to talk to you for a minute." Everybody left. She was sitting at a table with a book of songs. She said, "Would you look at these songs?" Instead of sitting down next to her I just stood and looked over her shoulder. She had a blouse on that was cut fairly low. I moved up against her, and I started to get a hardon. I'm standing right against her shoulder, pressing myself against her shoulder, looking over her shoulder at the music, and she's all red in the face and kind of trembling. Finally, she had to leave. She asked me if I would help her, getting something together, some arrangements for the choir.